


In Country

by oselle



Series: The All Saints Saga [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Croatoan/Endverse (Supernatural), Blood and Gore, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-26 07:54:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 5
Words: 63,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30102723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oselle/pseuds/oselle
Summary: The end of all things: Dean and Castiel head to Detroit to take on Lucifer, save Sam, and avert the end of the world. Sequel to "Feast of All Saints." Finale of The All Saints Saga. This is a multi-chapter work.
Relationships: Endverse Castiel/Endverse Dean Winchester, Lucifer/Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Series: The All Saints Saga [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2199570
Comments: 6
Kudos: 3





	1. Cairo

**Author's Note:**

> This story is more sexually explicit and graphically violent than the other stories in this series, including depictions of rape. Please read the tags and the warnings. Most of these chapters are very long, so if you don't like to read a lot of text on screen, you might want to print this out before you get too far into it.

It had once been a drive of eight hours from eastern Kentucky to Detroit, more than four hundred miles of it on Interstate 75 north through Cincinnati and Dayton and Toledo and all the cities of that old rustbelt corridor. That way was closed to them and closed to everyone and two days out from eastern Kentucky they came to an impassable pileup on an Ohio county route. They double-backed to the next road and found the same thing and on the next one too. The pileups had a deliberate look to them and they knew they would not be driving into Michigan. That night it rained and they holed up in the garage bay of an abandoned gas station and Dean took first watch while Cass fell asleep with his back against Dean's leg and Dean's hand heavy on his arm.  
  
A cold drizzle shrouded them all the next day and it was still raining when they found the house in the afternoon. It was small and white and the front door was closed and all the curtains on the first floor windows were down. The two of them stood in the road and stared at it through the misting rain.  
  
"We should dry off," Cass said.  
  
"For what? We're just gonna get wet again."  
  
"We should eat something."  
  
"You think it's empty?"  
  
"We haven't seen any sign of people since around Columbus," Cass said. He shook his head. "This close to Detroit...no one's left around here."  
  
Dean looked at Cass and he looked at the house and then he said, "Just long enough to eat. It's only two o'clock, we can't waste the daylight."  
  
They tramped across the road and up the steps. The front door was unlocked and they went in and closed the door behind them. The entry let onto a small living room and dining room with a kitchen visible behind these and a flight of carpeted stairs to the second floor. It was just light enough to see that the house had not been ransacked, that there were books on the shelves and a knit blanket on the sofa and around the dining table all of the chairs still stood in silent and orderly assembly. In the corner of his eye Cass saw Dean wipe his boots on the doormat and he did the same.  
  
The kitchen was as neat as the rest of the place although the pantry was almost empty. Powdered sugar. A bottle of dishwasher detergent. Parsley flakes. The refrigerator was also empty except for a box of baking soda, hard as a brick.  
  
"Looks like whoever lived here got out while the getting was good," Dean said.  
  
Cass went upstairs. There was a dripping sound up here and a sagging spot in the ceiling with long plaster stalactites pending from it and a puddle in the carpet beneath. It was the only sign that the house had been empty for a long time. He skirted the drip and passed a small bedroom and a green bathroom and next to that another bedroom, larger than the first. The windows here had only lace curtains over them and the room was pale gray and cool. He held aside the curtain and looked out over a leaflittered yard and the roof of a carport and bare trees. Someone had applied insulation plastic over this window and a corner of it had come loose and now rattled in the draft it had been put up to stop and Cass pressed it back onto the old tape and it was quiet.  
  
He turned around and slid his rifle off his shoulder and propped it up against the nightstand. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed. He put his hands down on either side of his knees and they looked very dirty against the white bedspread but the cotton felt clean and dry under his hands so he left them there. He closed his eyes and moved his hands over the bedspread and the weave whispered against his palms. He heard Dean coming up the stairs and when Cass opened his eyes Dean was standing in the doorway. His hair and the shoulders of his jacket were all wet. Cass took a deep breath and held it and let it out almost in a sigh.  
  
After a moment Dean said, "No."  
  
"There's nothing after here but Detroit."  
  
"We need the light."  
  
"We won't have another chance like this."  
  
"Cass..."  
  
"We won't."  
  
Dean stood there and looked at him. He glanced at the window. Then he put down his bag and his shotgun and turned away and took off his wet jacket and hung it on the doorknob.  
  
Unbuttoning his shirt, he said, "No sleeping."  
  
"No sleeping," Cass repeated and stood up and began to undress. When they lay down the bed was cold but soft with washworn sheets and they were naked and warm and while they made love the plastic came loose at the window and rattled and the curtain drifted and the scent of rain and autumn filled the room.  
  
* * *  
  
Afterward Dean lay next to Cass and Cass stroked his forearm from elbow to wrist and back. He turned his face into Dean's hair and said, "No sleeping."  
  
Dean murmured, "Fuck it," against Cass's shoulder. "It's raining."  
  
"I'll take watch," Cass said and he started to sit up and Dean pulled him back without even opening his eyes.  
  
"Fuck that too. There's no one around here."  
  
Cass smiled and settled down onto the bed. He lay there and listened to the rain on the roof and felt the steady rise and fall of Dean breathing against him. He closed his eyes and when he opened them the light had dimmed and the wind must have shifted because the plastic at the window was still and so except for the sound of rain and the drip of the decayed ceiling in the hallway the house was silent.  
  
In the quiet, Cass said, "There's no news out of Detroit." To himself or so he thought.  
  
After a moment Dean answered, "He's there."  
  
The rain in the hallway dripped once, twice, four times.  
  
"We don't know that."  
  
"An entire city doesn't go dark for no reason. Not even these days."  
  
"What if he's _not_ there?"  
  
Dean shifted and opened his eyes. "Cut it out, Cass."  
  
Cass moved to touch Dean's face and Dean reached up and took his hand and put it away.  
  
"I told you this didn't change anything."  
  
"I know it doesn't."  
  
"Then don't talk about Detroit as if we could just turn around and go back. We can't."  
  
"What do we do when we get there? We don't even know how to find him."  
  
"I think he'll find us."  
  
"That'll be even worse."  
  
Dean raised up and looked at Cass. "You said three miracles, Cass."  
  
"I know I did."  
  
"Well two down, one to go."  
  
Cass looked up at him and then turned his face away and closed his eyes and didn't say anything. After a while Dean rolled forward and pressed the whole naked length of himself against Cass and he was so warm that Cass turned back to him and his arms came up around him.  
  
"I don't want to talk about this stuff," Dean said and kissed his neck. "Not here." He kissed him again. "Not now."  
  
They rocked against each other and kissed and Dean turned over face-down onto the faded sheets. They made love again and then curled up together so close that Cass could press his insteps against the soles of Dean's feet and the daylight dimmed and Dean fell asleep and Cass lay awake for a while and then fell asleep himself.  
  
* * *  
  
When Cass woke up it was dusk and Dean was still sleeping. He rolled over and slipped out of bed and put his bare feet down on the cold floor and stood up. He felt around for his clothes and picked them up and dressed in only his jeans and shirt.  
  
"What's wrong?" Dean said and Cass turned to look at him. He was propped up on his elbow, already pushing back the covers.  
  
"Nothing, I have to take a leak."  
  
"Take the gun."  
  
"Yeah," Cass said. He slung the riflestrap over his shoulder and went downstairs. The house was cold and on the first floor it was very dark. He let himself out onto the backporch and leaned the rifle up against the rail and unzipped and pissed into the yard and fastened back up.  
  
"What's it like?"  
  
He grabbed the rifle and spun around. She was sitting in one of the aluminum chairs with her legs tucked up beneath her and she was so small that anyone would have taken her for a girl but she wasn't.  
  
"Do you know who I am?"  
  
"I know _what_ you are," Cass said. He lowered the gun, but only halfway. "I thought all of you were gone."  
  
"Where would we go? We can't fly off to heaven like you angels. Present company excepted."  
  
"I haven't seen a trickster in years."  
  
"I hate that name. Don't call me that."  
  
"What should I call you?"  
  
"You can call me Ainsel. And you can answer my question."  
  
"What question?"  
  
"What's it like?"  
  
"What's what like?"  
  
"Being in love...now that you're one of them. Is it nice?"  
  
Cass put his head down. He planted the stock of the rifle on the floorboards and looked up. "You didn't come out of nowhere just to ask me that. Why are you here?"  
  
"I want to help you," she said. "But first you have to tell me about this being in love. Do you like it?"  
  
"Yes. Yes I do."  
  
"Why?"  
  
Cass sighed. She leaned forward and sniffed the air and wrinkled her nose. "You smell like you need a bath. I'll bet he does too. Doesn't that bother you?"  
  
"No, I like the way he smells."  
  
"Is it all about the sex? Because I've _had_ sex, I've just never had sex good enough to die for."  
  
"I wouldn't die for the sex, I'd die for him."  
  
"Is that love?"  
  
"Yes, that's love."  
  
"It sounds awful."  
  
"Sometimes it is."  
  
"Then why do you keep on doing it?"  
  
"Because I don't have any choice," he said. He thought about it for a few seconds. "I never had any choice in the first place. I don't think anyone does."  
  
She cocked her head and studied him.  
  
"Does he love you too?"  
  
"In his own way."  
  
"Does he love you more than his brother?"  
  
"His brother is dead."  
  
"When he sees him again will he remember that he loves _you_...in his own way?"  
  
Cass smiled. "Trickster. What are you doing?"  
  
"A, I said don't call me that and B, I wanted to know if love will be enough to get the job done, but you don't seem to have anything useful to say about it." She grinned. "Although you _are_ awful pretty in bed."  
  
Cass shook his head. "You're all the same," he said. "Whatever you call yourselves, all you want to do is play games. Now it's your turn to answer _my_ question. Tell me why you're here."  
  
"That's an easy one. I'm here to help you get to Lucifer."  
  
"Really. Why would you do that? You have no stake in any of this."  
  
"If we don't do something the whole world will be nothing but a playground for demons and one fallen angel with a big bug up his ass."  
  
"Well, we could've used your help about...five years ago."  
  
"None of us thought it would get this bad. We've watched these people push themselves to the brink of disaster for thousands of years and always pull themselves back, but this time something has to be done."  
  
"How do I know you're not working for him?"  
  
"Who, Lucifer?" she laughed. "If he wanted to find you he wouldn't need my help. He's not looking for you Castiel, either one of you." She stood up and came over to him and Cass set his hand on the porchrail and took a step back. The evening had grown dark but she was bright and small and eldritch. "He knows you've got nothing. And _I_ know that all you have is some stupid faith that it's meant to be the two of you. That's very romantic but it's not a plan. You don't know anything or anyone in Detroit...I do. Someone who can help you."  
  
"Who?"  
  
"He calls himself Asher. He's set up in the Cairo Apartments on Matthew Street."  
  
"He's one like you?"  
  
"He's a demon."  
  
"Oh," Cass said. He looked up and coughed out a laugh. "A demon will tell us how to get to Lucifer.  
What's his real name? His _old_ name?"  
  
"Depends who you ask. Ashmadaevi, Asmodeus, Saturn. All one in the same."  
  
"No," Cass said. He shook his head. "No. I know who he is."  
  
"Do you?"  
  
"He's as ancient a servant of hell as Azazel was and he's a vulgar piece of filth on top of it. If he's in Detroit he's at Lucifer's right hand."  
  
"See, that's the fault with angels...with men, too. You think everything can be divided right down the middle. Asher doesn't serve Lucifer, he serves himself. He was on earth before Lucifer even existed and until now he's always come and gone as he pleased. He wants things to go back to the way they were."  
  
"Then why doesn't he take Lucifer out himself?"  
  
"Asher's in Detroit at Lucifer's will and he can't leave and things will stay that way as long as Lucifer is unbound. Asher has no power over him. He's waiting for you."  
  
"Waiting for us to kill Lucifer."  
  
"Not to kill him, he can't be killed. To bind him and send him back where he was."  
  
"And Asher knows how to do that?"  
  
"He knows a lot of things." She leaned forward and put her hot and tiny hand on his arm. "You're helpless, Castiel. Without someone on the inside, you and Dean are helpless."  
  
Cass looked down at her. Then he looked out into the darkened yard. He bit his lip, a habit he had picked up from Dean, unconsciously, and held onto, consciously. He smelled rotting leaves and heard rain dripping off the bare trees. If the weather cleared and they hit no setbacks they could reach Detroit city limits by tomorrow.  
  
"You trust him?"  
  
"In this I do."  
  
"If you're wrong and things go bad with him will you get us out?"  
  
"Detroit is fixed, I can't do anything there. But things won't go bad. Asher needs you as much as you need him."  
  
"The Cairo Apartments?"  
  
She nodded. "That's right. 1016 Matthew Street, you can't miss it. Tell him Ainsel sent you," she said and then she was gone. The slight tingle of her hand on his arm faded like a candlewick just blown out. Then Cass just stood there.  
  
He thought about Dean upstairs. He thought about them sleeping together for the first time not even two weeks ago and before that all the years he had loved Dean. Stretching back to hell itself. He wrapped one hand around the riflebarrel and the other around the porchrail and gripped both until his fingers ached and splinters slid into his palm.  
  
He talked about miracles yet the closer they came to Detroit the less possible any miracle seemed for God's ways were a mystery to men and angels alike and it might very well serve God for both of them to die or come to something worse than death. He would have thwarted God's will and turned Dean away from Detroit if he could have but he couldn't and so he had kindled a hope that the only miracle would be to find Detroit empty and abandoned as every other place. To find neither Lucifer nor any agent of his so that they would leave that place together and if they never found Lucifer and he burned the whole earth to a cinder then so be it and now this little spirit from a forgotten race had come and taken away even that sorry hope.  
  
_Don't tell him._  
  
The idea was so sudden and horrifying in its selfishness and thrilling in its simplicity that it dizzied him and he leaned against the porch and shut his eyes. Lucifer wasn't looking for them and wouldn't look for them and if they never went to Asher he would go on not looking for them and Cass stood on the porch for a little while longer and then he picked up the rifle and turned and went into the house.  
  
* * *  
  
He met Dean coming down the stairs, dressed and armed.  
  
"What the hell happened to you, that was the longest fucking piss anyone ever took."  
  
_Don't tell him. Don't._  
  
"We should eat," Cass said. "It's still raining we should...we should eat and spend the night."  
  
"Yeah...okay," Dean said. "I thought that's what we were gonna do anyway. It's not like we can go anywhere _now_."  
  
"No."  
  
Dean searched his face in the dark.  
  
"What's up with you?"  
  
"Nothing."  
  
"You sure?"  
  
"Yeah," he said and then more convincingly, "Yes."  
  
"Okay," Dean said and passed him on the stairs. "Think this fireplace works or you think there's a pack of squirrels living in it?"  
  
Cass watched from the stairs for a moment and then he went down to the living room and helped Dean build up the fire. The wood stacked beside the fireplace kindled quickly and began to fill the room with ashy smoke and Dean shoved at the flue handle until it was fully open and fanned the flames and the flue caught the smoke and drew it up the chimney and the fire blazed. They fed newspapers and magazines into it and Dean paused and spread one of the papers on his lap and looked at it.  
  
"I should've at least taken you to the movies, Cass," he said. "We should've done something fun before it all went to shit." He shook his head and smiled and Cass stared at him for a second and then leaned forward and kissed him. He held Dean's face in his hands and kissed him and Dean dropped the newspaper and wrapped his arms around Cass and they kissed and went on kissing and they would have undressed and had each other right there on the floor but Cass drew back and pressed his forehead against Dean's and sat there with his eyes closed.  
  
"What?" Dean said half out of breath.  
  
"I have to tell you something," Cass said. He could barely make the words come out of his mouth and had to say them through clenched teeth.  
  
"All right," Dean said. He took Cass's hands and held him by the wrists and ducked his head to look into his face. "Jesus Christ, Cass, what is it?"  
  
He slipped out of Dean's grasp and pushed himself back and stared into the fire and told Dean everything. When he was done he looked at Dean and neither of them spoke.  
  
Then Dean said, "You believe her?"  
  
Cass nodded. "Yes."  
  
"Well this is good. We have a lead, we have an in. Shit..." he said. "It's more than we had before."  
  
"Yeah," Cass said. He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes and stood up and dusted black ash from his palms and the splinters from the porchrail stung. "It's good."  
  
* * *  
  
They ate canned soup and the last of the bread that Amy had packed up for them. It was very warm in front of the fire and they sat there and watched the flames lick at the wood and the fire whispered and the coals shifted in the grate. Cass sat with his arms around his knees and he turned his head to look at Dean and after a moment Dean met his gaze. Neither of them said anything. When he'd been an angel Cass had thought that out of all their failings men were most culpable because they judged everything within the confines of their own short lives, indifferent to eternity, infinity, even God and now he understood how those things could mean so little compared to one flickering moment of joy. One life made infinitely and eternally holy by its very transience.  
  
Dean said, "You didn't want to tell me about that trickster, did you?"  
  
After a moment, Cass said, "No."  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"Because I don't want to find Lucifer. I don't want _you_ to find Lucifer."  
  
"I'm not exactly counting the minutes myself."  
  
"Will you promise me something?"  
  
"Depends what it is."  
  
"Promise me you'll stay alive."  
  
Dean looked away. "Come on, Cass..."  
  
"No. Promise me you'll do everything you can to stay alive."  
  
Dean looked back at him and then smiled and shook his head. "You know what, Cass? You already died for me once and you said you'd do it again. You're the one who didn't get out with Frank and the others when you had the chance. You went out into that shithole of Knoxville to save my ass when I was shot and you signed on to this goddamn Detroit job with me. So if anyone should be making promises like that...maybe it shouldn't be me."  
  
Cass put his forehead down on his knees and Dean went on, "This is a suicide mission and we both know it. We go in, we get the job done. If we can do that and make it out alive, great, if we don't...we don't."  
  
"Then _we_ don't," Cass said. He looked at Dean. "Whatever happens in Detroit, it's you _and_ me. At least promise me that."  
  
After a moment Dean said, "All right, I promise. Do you?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Good," Dean said and then he smiled. "You want to seal this deal or what?"  
  
"Down here or upstairs?"  
  
"It's a lot warmer down here."  
  
For the third time that day they made love and if Ainsel or Asmodeus or God himself were watching Cass thought, let them watch. When they were done he clasped his hands around Dean's back and his knees around Dean's hips and held onto him. After a while he rolled Dean over so that he could cover him with his whole body and that was better. He closed his eyes and laid his forehead against Dean's shoulder and could have wept for the fragility of life and joy and love and the whole fleeting world.  
  
* * *  
  
Detroit had been dying for a long time, longer than the release of Lucifer or the virus and now at last it was dead. Other cities were still ringed by National Guard troops and sectors of them were cordoned off by Quarantine Control but no such effort had been made for Detroit. At some point concrete barriers had been set across the highways to the south but it was unclear whether this had been to keep people out or keep them in. There were great pileups of abandoned vehicles on the city side of the barriers. On the other side a few military vehicles, some lying on their side, charred and skeletal. Corpses among the trucks. A great press of silence.  
  
They came into the city at dusk and they stood on Route 85 near the derelict bus depot and looked out over the rubbled streets. Behind them loomed the bridge that had been destroyed the year before to keep the virus from crossing the river. One tower still stood on the Canadian side with its suspension cables snapped and hanging slack over the water like the tentacles of some dead creature and the virus had crossed over anyway. They could see little fires burning in the city and they could smell the burning. Trash and wood, rubber and oil. The smell came off the river too, thick and toxic, and it began to snow. The snowflakes were flat and papery and gray as ash. By the last of the daylight Dean looked at the map folded over in his hands.  
  
"Matthew Street?" His voice fell flat in the silence.  
  
"Yeah. 1016 Matthew."  
  
Dean traced a line on the map with his finger and then looked up into the snow. "It's that way."  
  
Cass felt as if they were being watched and they probably were. The windows of the buildings and houses were all blank and yet did not seem empty. Dirt gritted under their feet and papers blew around them and once he thought he heard someone running behind them and Dean heard it too and they both wheeled around but the sound receded off among the empty lots and was gone.  
  
Now it was snowing and now it was not and now it was again. When they turned the corner onto Matthew they saw a century-old hulk of yellow brick in a style somewhere between moorish and gothic as if the builder had thought this incongruous mix of exotic elements suited the name of the place, carved across the stone lintel in silent-movie script. In front of the entrance stood a garden court that housed a single dead and twisted tree as black as burned iron. There were two lamps mounted on either side of the entrance and a bulb burned in the left one, the first electric light they had seen since Knoxville.  
  
The original doors of the place had long ago been looted and replaced with steel security doors the color of putty and each set with a square of wired glass. The door beside the working lamp was propped open and a man in lowslung chino pants and a tank top was lounging up against it smoking a cigarette. He had a black rag or scarf wrapped around his head with the tails hanging down to his shoulder and he blew smoke out into the cold air and stared at them.  
  
"Is that him?" Dean asked.  
  
"I don't know what he would look like."  
  
The man called out, "You gonna stand there or you gonna come on up?"  
  
"Are you Asher?" Cass said.  
  
The man laughed. He turned his head and spat onto the stone stairs. "I'm just the concierge, baby. Asher's waiting for you upstairs. Come on up now, don't be shy. All kinds of good things waiting for you at The Cairo."  
  
Cass and Dean looked at each other and Dean reached around to his back where the Colt was hidden.  
  
"This looks like a fuckin shitshow, Cass."  
  
Cass shook his head. "We don't have to do this."  
  
"You got any other ideas?"  
  
"He don't have no ideas," the man called from the doorway. "There ain't no idea but this one. All your days on this earth have brought you right to The Cairo. Where you gonna go if it ain't here?"  
  
"Man's got a point," Dean said.  
  
"The second something looks wrong, we're out."  
  
Dean glanced at the place and back at Cass with half a smile. "You think anything's gonna look _right_ in there?"  
  
They went up the walk and climbed the three steps and the man pitched his cigarette out into the dark and then stood back against the door to let them pass. The lobby was lit by one dusky bulb in a yellow utility cage. The floor was some intricate mosaic rendered indecipherable by missing tiles. On the right wall the old mailboxes had no doors and were stuffed with trash and cigarette butts. One slot somehow held a solitary piece of mail. Beneath the mailboxes two men were playing dice on a purple blanket and they glanced up at Cass and Dean and then went back to their business. The hall smelled like cigarettes, garbage, vermin, piss. The elevator doors stood open on nothing but a black shaft and a dank wind blew out of it and the cables inside made a low electric buzz and above the elevator the arched panel blinked the number three over and over behind milky yellow glass. From somewhere beneath the floor came a deep mechanical thrum like some engine turning in the guts of the building. Maybe the generator that kept this place lit up. Maybe the stalled elevator works. God only knew. The dice clicked.  
  
"Sixth floor," the man said. He lit another cigarette. "Take the stairs."  
  
The banisters had been plundered and the iron posts were still sunk in the marble to the right and left. In some places they had to climb over mounds of garbage and debris. Here and there a light burned on the wall, sometimes an incandescent bulb spotted with age, sometimes a fluorescent bar buzzing like a fly. They could hear footsteps on the floors above them and doors slamming and laughter and shrieks but they saw no one at all. Beneath these sounds the engine beneath them turned and turned with a heavy rolling sound like some great iron wheel or wheels churning over and over. They could feel the vibration of it beneath their feet. At each landing shadows seemed to run away from them into the greasy dark.  
  
The air up here was hot and stagnant. It stank even worse than it had downstairs. It smelled like shit and vomit. Like unwashed cunt and ass and like come dried stiff onto filthy sheets.  
  
"Dean. We should go."  
  
Dean didn't look at Cass. He kept climbing. "We can't."  
  
On the sixth floor they stopped and stood at the top of the stairs and looked down the hallway to the right and the left. Every door was closed. Above them two bulbs flickered in a crumbling plaster fixture.  
  
"Now what?" Dean said. "We just start knocking?"  
  
Something was walking towards them. Someone was walking towards them. A bony girl resolved out of the brown shadows as if she were emerging from smoke. At first Cass thought she had a horrible limp and then he saw that one foot was bare while the other was strapped into three inches of gold platform sandal. Other than this she was wearing only a string bikini bottom and cropped t-shirt. The jagged bones of her hips ground away beneath the bikini bows.  
  
"You're the guys who're here to see Asher?"  
  
"Yeah," Dean said.  
  
"Okay," she said and turned around and walked off the way she'd come. She had a raw and swollen tattoo above the slack triangle of fabric that barely covered her rear and Cass stared at it until he realized it was a crude drawing of a naked woman on her hands and knees with her breasts dangling and her ass up in the air. Above her was inked an unfurled banner that read OPEN FOR BUSINESS.  
  
"That thing on your back looks infected," Dean said.  
  
The girl barked out a laugh and kept walking. "That ain't the only thing infected on me."  
  
They moved through pockets of light and dark. The girl's one shoe clomped and clomped. The engine below turned and turned.  
  
"Why don't you take off that shoe?" Dean said. "You'd be better off barefoot."  
  
Cass looked at him. They were in a dark place and Cass couldn't see him. The girl stopped in front of a door at the end of the hall and she pushed it open and leaned against it.  
  
"Go on," she said. "This is Asher's place."  
  
Cass went in first and behind him the girl said, "Asher gave me this shoe. I earned it."  
  
Dean said, "How?"  
  
Cass turned to Dean and said his name but Dean was looking at the girl.  
  
"I learned how to stick my tongue up his ass the way he likes it. I'll get the other shoe when I learn some new tricks." She looked Dean up and down. "You wanna teach me some?"  
  
Cass said Dean's name again, sharply, and Dean looked at him. "Stop talking to her." To the girl he said, "Where's Asher?"  
  
She smiled. "He's coming."  
  
"Then get out of here."  
  
She pulled some face that was neither a pout nor a smirk but some ugly combination of both and then pivoted on her one mountainous shoe and stepped out and pulled the door shut behind her.  
  
"Are you all right?"  
  
"I'm fine," Dean said. He stood there by the door with his bag over his shoulder and his shotgun in his hand. "What's wrong with _you_?"  
  
"Nothing," he said. He felt dazed but whether from the noise or the heat or the stench he couldn't tell. His pulse throbbed in time with the sound from the basement. He turned and looked at the apartment. It was one bleak room and an efficiency kitchen. A bare bulb hung from a wire in the kitchen ceiling. In the living room, a shattered television and a recliner with the stuffing boiling out of the seat. A stained and springshot mattress on the floor. Paint had fallen from the walls in curdled sheets and there were two naked windows in the far wall and a light was coming in through them, some spotlight that flared in and crawled up the walls and up across the ceiling and went back out and then did it all over again in a steady creep that seemed tied to the throbbing of the engine below. Now louder than ever. Cass had never seen this place before and yet felt as if he had in some nightmare. Some dark well of imagination as potent as memory.  
  
_I've never been here,_ he thought and on the heels of that, _I_ have _been here._ He whispered "What the fuck is this?"  
  
From behind him Dean said, "I know what it is."  
  
Cass stood there or thought he stood there for a long time and he was afraid to turn around though he couldn't have said why, only that there was a dread on him like a weight of chains. Then he was looking at Dean but Dean was not looking at him and his own tongue was locked inside his mouth and Dean took two steps into the apartment and put the duffel on the floor and reached behind himself and pulled out the Colt and bent over and set that down on top of the bag. Then he straightened up and just let the shotgun fall to the floor and he looked at Cass without seeming to see him.  
  
"I know what happens here."  
  
The light came in. Crept across the apartment like a living thing. It lit up Dean's face and Dean tracked it up the ceiling and watched it go out. Then he started taking off his clothes.  
  
"What are you doing?" Cass said but he knew. He thought, _Stop this and get him out of here,_ and if he'd still been an angel he would have been able to do that but he wasn't. His groin flooded with heat unbidden as if something had burst inside him. Dean pulled off his boots. He shucked off his jeans and stood there naked. The light crawled up him.  
  
"Where you want it? On the mattress? Just you or you bringing some friends?"  
  
He swallowed. His mouth was dry and his tongue felt thick inside his jaws.  
  
"What's the matter?" Dean laughed. "You guys getting a limp dick on me all of a sudden?"  
  
A reel of pornographic depravity unspooled in his head of things the angels had told him before he'd gone down to hell for Dean and things he'd seen in Dean's own nightmares and memories when he'd still had that sight. And one thought that came as if whispered in his ear from the black belly of this place, that he had waited a long time for Dean, pined away for him for a long goddamn time and given up everything for him and all that after every ratfuck demon in hell had gotten a free piece for forty fucking years and now it was time to make up for that shit.  
  
Fuck, his dick was rock-hard and aching up into his belly.  
  
He opened his mouth and heard himself say, "Don't put up much of a fight, do you?"  
  
"What the fuck for?" Dean said. "To get you off?"  
  
The light came in again and lit Dean up all naked he was standing there and it went up the ceiling and out. The engine turned. The room throbbed. The light came back, up, over, out.  
  
"Get on the fucking mattress," he said and Dean smirked and went to it and lay down on his stomach and spread his legs.  
  
He stalked over in a stilted gait because his cock was so fucking hard. It felt like a goddamn club between his legs. He knelt on the mattress between Dean's legs and grabbed Dean's hips and jerked him up so that Dean was on his knees and forearms. Open for business, just like the sign said. He unzipped his fly and even with the sound from below Dean heard that and said, "That's it, motherfucker."  
  
"Yeah, that's it," he said. "You better believe it." He pulled out his dick and it was heavy and huge in his hand and already wet at the head. "You fuckin love it," he said and pushed in with no prelude and no slick except his own leaking juice and Dean caught his breath and locked up and he said, "Open wide," and shoved himself in up to the hilt and stopped there with his dick throbbing away inside Dean and then he started fucking him.  
  
He fucked him and now he heard all around him through the walls other people fucking, screaming and cursing and grunting like beasts. The whole place was fucking the walls were bleating beating bleeding with it and all of it in time with that pulsing noise like hell's machinery hot and dirty and endless churning up fire and filth from the guts of the earth. Light glared up the wall up the ceiling out. Dean was almost bent double beneath him and sucking air between clenched teeth and when he saw Dean try to get himself up on one hand and brace the other against the wall he put his palm flat on Dean's back and shoved him down until the crown of his head was on the mattress.  
  
"You stay down there. Stay down there and take it how you like it."  
  
He clamped his hands around Dean's hipblades and threw his head back and pumped into him. He was running with sweat and his dick felt bigger with every thrust.  
  
"I'm gonna go for hours," he said in a voice that was barely his own. "Gonna bust you open all night and you'll still beg for it. Won't you? Yeah." He spewed out a litany of obscene plans and imputations.  
  
Dean didn't say anything. Dean wasn't making a sound. The light came in. He saw his own shadow against the wall, distorted and hunched and humping like a bedlamite, a monster, a devil. Now it was quiet. Now it was very quiet. He heard himself grunting. The squeal of rusted springs in the mattress. His own dick sucking in and out. He looked down panting. The light moved up the ceiling, reflected down onto Dean's face. He was lying with his neck twisted to the right and his cheek against the mattress and his eyes half open and blank and Cass suddenly cried out and pushed Dean away from him and fell backwards onto the floor.  
  
His guts, loins, genitals were on fire, engorged, excruciating. He rolled over and grabbed himself in both hands and after a few hard jerks he began to come onto the floor in thick burning spurts that wouldn't stop. He didn't know how long he lay there and pulled at himself until he was empty. When he finally sat up he was still half erect and aching and there was a viscous splatter of come sprayed across the floor that reminded him of a drunk's runny vomit. He stuffed himself into his open fly and zipped up, his hands trembling.  
  
He said, "Dean?" He turned onto his hands and knees and crawled to the mattress. Dean was lying on his side where Cass had thrown him. His hands were over his face and his whole body shook. "Dean?" he repeated and came up on the mattress and touched Dean's shoulder and Dean rolled onto his back and took his hands from his face and burst out laughing.  
  
"Can't finish the job?"  
  
"Dean, listen to me..."  
  
"Maybe if you stuck it down my throat."  
  
"We have to get out of here."  
  
"Come _on_ you sonofabitch," Dean said. He grabbed for Cass's crotch. "Let me suck you off."  
  
His dick was swelling. He closed his eyes and took Dean by the wrists.  
  
"Dean..."  
  
"I knew none of you had any fucking sack," Dean said and then he tipped his head back on the filthy mattress and shouted, "What do I have to do to suck some cock around here?" and from outside that apartment the whole building came to life with whoops and howls and a pounding of feet on the stairs and fists against the walls.  
  
"Shhh, Dean, shhh..." The noise from the halls was hideous.  
  
"I wanna _suck some fuckin dick_!" Dean bellowed. "Jesus _fuckin_ Christ!" He started to laugh so hard he was screaming.  
  
"Stop it!" he pleaded and straddled Dean and put a hand over his mouth and for a second Dean arched up taut as if he would buck Cass off and then he just went still and stared up at him.  
  
"We have to go, Dean, please. Do you understand me?"  
  
Dean blinked. He nodded slowly.  
  
"Do you know who I am?"  
  
Dean nodded again.  
  
"Okay," Cass said. He slid his hand from Dean's mouth and cupped his face. "Okay, let's go."  
  
Dean looked at him for a second and then turned his head and took Cass's thumb in his mouth and wrapped his tongue around it and made a guttural noise in his throat. Cass felt it up the whole length of his arm. He felt it all the way down to his dick. He closed his eyes and worked his thumb down into the wet heat at the back of Dean's throat and Dean moaned and Cass put his hand on the bulge between his legs and his fingers were on his zipper and then he opened his eyes and yanked his hand out of Dean's mouth and hit him hard across the face. Dean's head snapped to the side and his eyelids dipped and fluttered and he looked up at Cass half stunned.  
  
"I'm sorry," Cass breathed. His arm hung in the air.  
  
Dean grinned wolfishly. There was blood on his teeth.  
  
"That's how you want it?"  
  
Cass hesitated and then he drew back his fist and hit him again and Dean's eyes rolled up and he was out. Cass knelt there for a second and then he swung his leg over Dean and got up off the mattress. The only light now was from the naked bulb in the kitchen and in its feeble gray illumination he gathered Dean's clothes up from the floor. When he brought them back to the mattress Dean was coming around and he turned his head to Cass.  
  
"Cass?"  
  
"Yeah," Cass said. He dropped the clothes on the mattress and knelt down beside Dean and got his hands under Dean's arms. "You have to get dressed."  
  
"What..." he said. He raised up on his elbows. "Why the fuck am I _un_ dressed?"  
  
"Because we have to get out of here."  
  
Dean lay there in a daze. He ran his tongue out to the corner of his mouth where he was bloody and touched his jaw. "Did you _hit_ me?"  
  
He pulled Dean's t-shirt over his head and Dean slid his arms into it and sat up and winced. "Did you _fuck_ me?"  
  
"Yes," Cass said. He handed Dean his jeans and Dean took them and sat there staring at him. His eyes moved past Cass and took in the whole squalid room.  
  
"Ahh fuck," he said wearily. He looked back at Cass. "Tell me it was just you."  
  
"It was just me."  
  
"You okay?"  
  
Cass nodded and Dean said, "All right. I don't..." He shook his head. "I don't want to know anything else." He got to his feet and stumbled off the mattress and Cass caught him by the arm. When he was steady Dean nodded and Cass let go of him and he pulled on the rest of his clothes and Cass brought him his boots and he took them and knelt down to put them on.  
  
"Asher never showed up, did he?"  
  
"No," Cass said. He handed Dean the Colt and Dean hunched over and shoved it back in his belt and looked up at him.  
  
"It was all a trick, wasn't it?"  
  
"I think so," Cass said. He helped Dean to his feet and Dean put on his jacket and he gave Cass such a bleak look that Cass's heart ached and yet for one wildly hopeful moment he thought, _We can go now_. From The Cairo, Detroit, the whole damned place.  
  
He put his hand on Dean's arm and turned to the door and the man was sitting beside the door in the shredded recliner and Cass had never laid eyes on him before but knew who he was all the same.  
  
Asher said, "Not a trick, a test."  
  
They stood there and stared at him and he sat in the shadows and none of them said anything. He was bald except for a crescent of white hair above his ears and the white hair that came up through his open shirtcollar and he was thickset as an old prizefighter with a bulldog head on a slab of neck. His hands on the arms of the recliner were almost square, the fingers so blunt they seemed all of the same length. Beneath the cuffs of his black trousers his feet were bare and calloused and set with long nails. Cass could smell him, sulfur and sweat and the back-closet mothy funk of his suit jacket.  
  
Castiel said, "Asmodeus," and he answered, "Castiel," and then to Dean he said, "And Dean. I've missed you Dean. Things were never the same after this one bailed you out."  
  
Cass could hear Dean breathing hard behind him and he turned to him and in one motion Dean pulled out the Colt and leveled it at Asher and Cass held up his hands but Dean wasn't looking at him.  
  
"I remember you too, you cocksucker."  
  
"If I recall, _you_ were the one sucking cock."  
  
"If I'd known it was you I'd have..."  
  
"What? Gone wandering around Detroit until you stumbled into Lucifer?"  
  
Dean drew in a deep breath. His jaw was clenched and shaking and Cass whispered his name and Dean glanced at him and then back at Asher.  
  
"Come on, Dean," Asher said. "Water under the bridge, isn't it?"  
  
Dean looked at Cass and blinked and lowered the gun.  
  
"That's better," Asher said. "I didn't ask you here expecting to get shot."  
  
"And we didn't come here expecting to be part of your goddamn freakshow. Can you get us to Lucifer or not?"  
  
"Oh yes. Better than that, I can show you how to put him back where he belongs. For good."  
  
"How?"  
  
Asher stood up. "That is a long story and I'd like to tell it somewhere else." He looked at the puddle of come on the floor and glanced at Cass and winked. "This place is nasty." He turned to the door and Dean put the Colt back in his belt and Cass said, "Dean, I didn't...I should have known."  
  
Without looking up Dean said, "It's all right, Cass."  
  
"Are _you?_ "  
  
Dean repeated, "It's all right," and shouldered past Cass and picked up the bag and shotgun and walked out of the apartment.  
  
In the hall the bony girl was leaning up against the far wall with her bare and dirty foot perched on the sandaled one. She stood up when they came out and balanced on her platform like a gymnast and picked at her fingernails.  
  
Asher said, "Someone shot their load all over the goddamn floor. Get in there and clean it up."  
  
She stood there with her face slack. Shredding her cuticles. When Cass passed her he said, "I'm sorry."  
  
"For what?"  
  
He shook his head and then turned away from her and Dean who had been right ahead of him was not there and Asher was not there and the long hallway was intersticed as before with dim light and black shadow and empty of anyone save himself and the girl.  
  
He called out, "Dean?" and got no response.  
  
He broke into a run to the stairs but they were also empty and he launched himself down them shouting Dean's name and from the landing above him the girl said, "They're gone," and he stopped and looked up at her.  
  
"Where? Which way did they go?"  
  
She shrugged.  
  
"That's how it is around here. People're just there one second gone the next. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don't."  
  
"Did you _see_ them go?"  
  
She shook her head. "You get used to it after a while. _Asher_ always comes back."  
  
He stared at her for a second and then turned and ran, half falling down the stairs in the stinking dark, and she shouted, "I'm telling you they're gone!" but she was receding and his feet pounded on the stairs and his voice echoed off the walls and no one answered. On the third floor someone grabbed his arm and spun him onto the landing and threw him up against the wall and Asher was standing there with his eyes gone dead white in his thuggish face.  
  
"Lights out," he said and shoved the flat of his hand against Cass's forehead and Cass felt his knees buckle and himself slide down the wall and Asher's frozen hand on his head and then the lights did indeed go out.


	2. Michigan Central

He woke on a concrete floor that was cold against his cheek. He opened his eyes and saw the glinting spokes of a wheel and he raised his head and saw that the wheel was attached to the steel crossbar of a wheelchair. He lay there dazed for another second and then he came to himself with such a jolt that he had to pinwheel for balance and he grabbed the arm of the wheelchair but it went rolling out from under him and crashed to the floor. He got up on his hands and knees and saw a cinderblock wall behind him and around him three walls of black bars inset with black grilles. His cell was in the middle of a row of identical storage lockers and outside of them was Asher.  
  
"Good morning," he said. He sat in a folding chair next to a card table and his elbow was on the table and a Phillies blunt smoked between his thick fingers. Cass stared at him through the grilles.  
  
"Where is he?" His voice was dry and cracked as if he hadn't spoken in days.  
  
"Dean."  
  
"Dean. Where is he?"  
  
"I sent him on his way."  
  
"What does that mean?"  
  
"He had a job to do and I sent him along to do it."  
  
Cass took three hard breaths through his nose.  
  
"You sent him to Lucifer."  
  
"He _went_ to Lucifer. With my counsel and blessing, of course."  
  
Cass bent over and yanked up the leg of his jeans and thrust his hand down into his boot and Asher said, "Looking for this?" Cass looked up and saw Asher holding Ruby's knife by the handle between his thumb and forefinger with the point sunk down in the table. He spun it gently back and forth. "What were you going to do? Stab me from eight feet away? Throw it at me and see if it could penetrate welded steel?" He laughed. "It's not _that_ special."  
  
Cass got to his feet and crossed to stand at the front of the cell.  
  
"Let me out."  
  
Asher raised an eyebrow.  
  
"Let me _out_."  
  
"No."  
  
He slammed his fist against the grille. "Fuck you! Let me out of here _now!_ "  
  
"Fuck _you_ and no."  
  
"It was trap, wasn't it?" He hammered the grille again and it rang like a tuning fork. _"Wasn't it?"_  
  
"Not a trap _or_ a trick. A test, like I said."  
  
"Test. What test?"  
  
"To see if you could be trusted. Clearly, you couldn't."  
  
"What are you talking about?"  
  
"You're in love with him, you stupid fuck."  
  
Cass stood there and stared. Asher squinted at him and sucked on the blunt.  
  
"If you were just buggering him it would be one thing but you're in love with him." His words chimneyed out on gray smoke. "Your head's all twisted up over this guy. You don't know whether to fuck him or worship him or take a fucking bullet for him. You're a goddamn mess."  
  
"What happened upstairs was your doing."  
  
"Right. I had my dick up his ass."  
  
"You made that happen."  
  
"People always blame someone like me for their horrible shit, but all I ever do is set the mood. I knew our post-traumatic friend never stood a chance but I had a little more hope for you."  
  
Asher stubbed the little cigar out on the table then sat there and sucked his teeth and contemplated the ashes as if he were reading tea leaves.  
  
"There's only one thing in your head and that's Dean," he said. He looked at Cass. "You don't give a shit about Lucifer, this job, the whole goddamn world. Dean Dean Dean. That's a problem. That's a big fucking problem."  
  
Cass couldn't find anything to say. He curled his hands into fists and dug his nails into his palms. Finally he said, "Dean is with Lucifer now."  
  
"Yes he is."  
  
"You turned him over."  
  
"No, he went willingly once he understood the situation."  
  
"You lied to him."  
  
"Exactly the opposite."  
  
"He wouldn't have gone alone unless you lied to him."  
  
"He knew that was the only way."  
  
"And he went, just like that. No questions asked."  
  
"He took some convincing."  
  
"What? Ten minutes' worth?"  
  
"No, about three days' worth."  
  
Cass blinked.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Time is different in Detroit these days. It's been three days since you and Dean had your little fling up in the ah...honeymoon suite."  
  
Cass swallowed. He stared at Asher and then down at the floor and then up.  
  
"What did you do to him?" he whispered. "What the _fuck_ did you tell him?"  
  
Asher leaned back and crossed his left ankle over his right knee. He pointed a waxy finger at Cass.  
  
"You ever see a ship in a bottle?"  
  
Cass didn't answer.  
  
"Have you ever? Seen a ship? In a bottle?"  
  
Cass pressed his lips together. He took a deep breath and held it.  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Everyone thinks it's hard to get it in there but it's a lot harder to get it out. You really want it out, you're gonna have to break the bottle. But what if you _can't_ break the bottle? What if you can't break the _vessel_?" He cocked his head at Cass. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"  
  
"Lucifer's vessel. Sam."  
  
Asher nodded.  
  
"Dean has to kill Sam."  
  
Asher shook his head.  
  
"Lucifer's untouchable as long as he's in his vessel. He has to be gotten out of there first. Only Dean can get him out."  
  
"How is he supposed to do that?"  
  
"Because Lucifer's not alone in there," Asher said. "We've got a man on the inside. And that man is Dean's baby brother."  
  
"Sam is dead."  
  
"Sam is not dead."  
  
Cass shook his head. "No..." he said. "No. That's a lie."  
  
"It's the truth and now Dean knows it."  
  
"Oh God..." Cass said. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth and couldn't say anything else.  
  
"This is something only Dean can do. You understand?"  
  
"Lucifer will kill him," he said. "Or torture him or have him possessed or drive him out of his mind. He'll do it just to make Sam watch."  
  
"Maybe," Asher said. "But he'd probably have done it to make _you_ watch, too, loverboy. And I have bigger plans for you. _You_ , my last remnant of the heavenly host on earth, are going to bind Lucifer once he's out of his nice warm vessel."  
  
Cass smirked and shook his head.  
  
"With _what_?"  
  
"I have Lucifer's chains. The very same ones that kept him nice and tucked away for all those years."  
  
"That's impossible," Cass said. You couldn't..."  
  
"Oh, but I do. He was in an awful hurry to get them off, didn't stop to look around and see who might be picking them up." He pointed at Cass. "But only an angel can use them."  
  
"Then you're shit out of luck because I'm not an angel."  
  
"These are hard times," Asher smiled. "We all gotta learn to make do."  
  
Asher stood up. The legs of his chair scraped back and his calloused heels made a leathery clap on the floor and he came right up to the cell and grinned at Cass through the grille.  
  
"The firstborn son and the fallen angel. One to release the devil. The other to bind him. You're the only ones who can do it but one of you isn't up to the task yet. You're too in love to think straight. That's why you're here. I need you out of Dean's way so he can do what _he_ has to do and meanwhile, you need to cool off and get _your_ fucking head back in the game."  
  
"For how long?"  
  
"I'll have to get back to you on that."  
  
"No," Cass said and looked up. "How long?"  
  
"When the time comes, you'll be the first to know."  
  
"Asmodeus," Cass said. "Let me out of here."  
  
"No."  
  
"If you have these chains, let me out of here and show me how to use them."  
  
"Not yet. You wouldn't even hear a word I said, you'd just go running out of here half-cocked to rescue the damsel in distress." He shook his head. "Look at yourself," he said with disgust. "You were an _angel_ , for fuck's sake. Look what you've become."  
  
He turned away and went back to the table and picked up the knife and disappeared it somewhere under his suit jacket and without a look back he walked off into the shadows of the basement.  
  
Cass pressed his face against the grille. "Asmodeus! _Asher!_ "  
  
A heavy door slammed and then Cass heard nothing else. He shouted for Asher twice more and then he stepped away from the bars and looked around himself in a blind panic and fury and all he saw was the wheelchair and though it could do no good he picked it up and hurled it at the bars of his cell and it burst apart in a great clang of rusted metal and the front wheel went spinning off across the floor until it stopped against the wall and toppled over. Then it was quiet. His heart pounded in his ears and he stood there panting.  
  
 _He's lying,_ he thought.  
  
 _What if he isn't?_  
  
"He's lying," Cass said out loud but knew that even if Asher wasn't lying it didn't matter because Dean had gone to Lucifer believing that his brother or some shadow of him was imprisoned in that body and he knew that Dean would do anything and subject to anything for his brother's sake. If Asher had told the truth Cass had lost three days already. He thought about that. About himself lying senseless and useless in that basement. About Dean alone with Asher for those three days. He began to shake and he couldn't allow himself that so he grabbed his elbows and steadied himself.  
  
He looked around the locker. The only thing in there besides the broken husk of the wheelchair was a steamertrunk against the wall and he went and looked down at it. There was a yellowed and curling shipping label on the top from the Union Transfer Company in San Francisco, Telephone Douglas 83. For no reason he reached down and picked at it and the parchment-thin paper turned to dust between his fingers.  
  
He picked through the remains of the wheelchair until he found a bar that was long enough and he went back to the trunk and crouched down and got the bar under the brass lock and wrenched it back and the entire lock tore off with a rotting strip of leather attached to it. Inside the trunk he found women's clothes and shoes and hats. An ivory hairbrush with the boar bristles falling out. Pearl earrings gone brown with age. He picked up a leatherbound address book and out of it slipped a black-and-white photo of a woman in dark lipstick and an elaborate coif of curls. The name Eunice was written across the bottom in florid penstrokes. He let the lid of the trunk fall closed and stood up and looked toward the door of the cell. It was fastened with a padlocked chain and he crossed over to it and pulled at the chain until the padlock was flush against the grille and he worked the wheelchair bar through the mesh and tried to get at the hasp of the padlock but he couldn't so he set to work on the chain. Within a few minutes he was sweating and the bar was slippery in his hands and he banged his knuckles against the bars until he finally struck them so hard that he cursed out loud and dropped the bar and stuck his fingers in his mouth.  
  
He tasted blood and he counted to ten. He opened his eyes and pulled the chain taut again so that the padlock was against the grille. He bent over and stared at it. After a while he let it go and it rattled back into place. He went to the back of the cell and picked up the little wheel that had come off the wheelchair and examined the spokes. One of them was already sticking out. He squatted down and put the wheel on the floor and braced it with his knee and tore out three spokes. They were maybe six inches long. He studied them from tip to tip and then he bent over and began filing the ends of two spokes against the concrete floor. Every now and then he would stop and lift them to his eyes and blow on them and turn them this way and that and then go back to filing. When he was finished the spokes were as finely pointed as needles and he smiled because it was Dean who had taught him how to do things like this after he'd lost all of his other, better talents.  
  
He went to the door and pulled the chain towards him and wedged it with the wheelchair bar so that it wouldn't fall back. With the unfiled spoke he angled the padlock up so that the keyhole was facing him and he went to work on the keyhole with the two picks he'd made.  
  
"Come on," he whispered. "Come on, come on." He gnawed his lip. Sweat ran into his eyes. His fingers were slick with blood.  
  
His legs started to shake and he stopped and got the trunk and dragged it over so that he could sit on it. It sagged under his weight but held. He went back to work.  
  
He'd been at it for a while when he heard the basement door squeal open. He stopped, listening. The door squealed again, slowly, as if someone were closing it with great care to be quiet. Then he heard footsteps. He stood up quickly and pulled out the bar and threw it and the spokes into the trunk and closed it and sat on it. When he looked up the bony girl from upstairs was standing there. She was wearing the same clothes if they could even be called clothes but now she had platform sandals on both feet. They didn't match.  
  
He stared at her through the grille and she stared at him. She scratched her stomach and didn't say anything. She looked nearly imbecile.  
  
Finally she said, "You're awake."  
  
Cass nodded.  
  
"I'm not supposed to be down here."  
  
"Then why are you?"  
  
She shrugged. "I wanted to see if you were all right."  
  
"How did you know I was here?"  
  
"Marcus told me."  
  
"Who's Marcus?"  
  
"The guy who watches the door."  
  
"Oh."  
  
"He put you down here."  
  
"When?"  
  
"A few days ago."  
  
"Did he..." Cass leaned forward. "Did he see the man who was with me?"  
  
"The really hot one?"  
  
"Yeah. The really hot one."  
  
She shook her head. "No. He's gone."  
  
"Do you know where he went?"  
  
"Asher took him someplace."  
  
"Does Asher do that a lot? Take people away?"  
  
She shrugged. "People just sort of come and go around here."  
  
"Do you know where they go?"  
  
"No. I never go anywhere."  
  
"But Asher goes away?"  
  
"Yeah, sometimes."  
  
"Where does he go?"  
  
She shut her mouth and looked around the basement. She scratched her stomach again. Her fingernails were black with dirt.  
  
Cass put his hand against the grille and curled his fingers through it and smiled.  
  
"What's your name?" he asked.  
  
She smirked and snorted. "Phyllis."  
  
"That's pretty."  
  
"That's not my name," she snapped. She put her head down and absently worked the tip of her thumb under the top of her bikini bottom. "It's short for syphilis. You get that from screwing." She looked up at Cass. "I don't have it!"  
  
"No, I'm sure you don't. What's your real name?"  
  
"If I tell you will you promise not to tell anyone?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Because only Marcus knows and I don't want anyone else to know."  
  
"I won't tell anyone."  
  
She looked away and then looked back and whispered, "It's Tanya."  
  
"That's much prettier than Phyllis."  
  
"I know. Don't tell anyone."  
  
"I won't," Cass said and she smiled and took a step toward the cell and asked his name.  
  
"My name is Cass."  
  
She put her hand on the grille. "Is that short for something?"  
  
"No."  
  
"It's nice. Cass. Why did Asher lock you up?"  
  
"I don't know."  
  
"Did you piss him off?"  
  
"No."  
  
"What did your friend do?"  
  
"He didn't do anything."  
  
"Asher's a mean prick," she said. "He probably just wanted to fuck him. He goes both ways. And he was really hot. Your friend, not Asher." She made a face. "Asher's disgusting. He stinks like rotten eggs. Even his jizz stinks like..."  
  
"Tanya?"  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
Her hand on the grille was close enough for Cass to touch. He laid two fingers over her pinkie and she looked at that.  
  
"Do you know where Asher goes when he leaves?"  
  
She shook her head. "I don't. But Marcus...Marcus once told me he goes to the train station a lot."  
  
"The train station?"  
  
"Yeah. I don't know what he goes there for, it's all banged out."  
  
"Where is the train station?"  
  
"I don't think it's that far from here. But I don't go out anymore." She looked at their hands again and then looked at him. "You could do me if you want. I wouldn't mind doing it with someone like you."  
  
She smiled up at him in a sad pantomime of flirting and Cass looked at her and studied her and for a moment he almost turned away from her but he didn't.  
  
"Do you have the key, Tanya? We can't do anything with this grille here."  
  
"No look!" she said. She grinned and pointed. "There's a little place down here where it's busted out!"  
  
He looked at the gap in the grille down near the edge of the cell. He looked back at the girl and she seemed so hopeful that it made his heart sick.  
  
"Tanya, I don't want to screw you through a hole in a grille. Okay? If you could get the key..."  
  
"Marcus has keys."  
  
"Would you be able to get the key from Marcus? Without him knowing?"  
  
"I don't think so. I wasn't supposed to come down here at all."  
  
"Is Asher around?"  
  
"I don't know where he is."  
  
"What if you told Marcus you just wanted to party? Would he give you the key?"  
  
"Marcus says I party too much."  
  
"Do you think you could try? Tanya? Do you think you could do that?"  
  
She stared at him wide-eyed as a doll. She put her face against the grille.  
  
"Would you kiss me?" she whispered.  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Would you hold me afterwards?"  
  
"I'd hold you as long as you wanted."  
  
"Marcus might have to stand outside the door while we did it. But he won't come in. He never does."  
  
"That's okay. We just need the key."  
  
"Okay," she breathed. She smiled and turned away. When she was halfway across the basement she ran back and kissed Cass's fingers and she beamed up at him. In that second she was almost pretty and Cass could see the girl she might have been in some other time and place and would never be and then she turned and ran to the door in her towering awful shoes with her skinny white legs flashing like neon beams in the shadows. And though Cass was shaking over what he'd just done and was about to do, he opened the trunk and took out the long wheelchair bar and sat down to wait for Tanya to come back with the key.  
  
* * *  
  
He stood up when he heard the basement door open and he listened to the clop of Tanya's sandals on the concrete. She sounded as if she were tripping over her feet in haste and he could hear the jingle of keys and he put the bar behind his back and stepped away from the door. When she hove into view out of the dark Asher was at her side with his hand around her arm. She was half-dangling in his grip.  
  
"Phyllis said you want to fuck," Asher said. He held up a ring of keys. "She said you told her to get these."  
  
Cass didn't answer. He let the bar slip out of his hands and it thudded softly onto the lid of the trunk. Asher stuck the keys in his pocket and dragged Tanya over to the door of Cass's cell. He yanked at the bars and the door sprang open and Asher shoved the girl in and slammed the door and picked up the lock and looped it through the chain and snapped it shut.  
  
"Go ahead and fuck."  
  
Tanya stood there with her head down. Cass didn't move. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and then she pulled her half-shirt over her head and dropped it on the floor and scrawny and nearly naked she started to untie the bikini bow over one jutting hip.  
  
"Stop," Cass said. She looked up at him and he picked up her shirt and handed it to her and she stared at it as if she hardly knew what it was.  
  
"What are you doing?" she said.  
  
"Nothing, just...I'm sorry. Get dressed."  
  
"Don't you wanna..."  
  
Outside the cell Asher started laughing.  
  
"No, he don't wanna. I think our guest prefers boys. Pretty boys with green eyes. Ahh, why are all the cute ones queer, eh Phil?"  
  
She hugged her shirt to her chest. "I didn't wanna tell him," she said to Cass.  
  
"I know you didn't. It's okay."  
  
Asher let out a deep belly laugh and shook his head. This time he opened the lock with the key and he ran the chain through the bars and opened the door.  
  
"Come on outta there, sugar."  
  
She ducked her head and turned away and at the door she looked back at Cass and Asher grabbed her arm and pulled her out so hard she went stumbling across the room and crashed into the card table and fell over in a sprawl.  
  
"Leave her alone!" Cass said. "She didn't do anything!"  
  
Asher raised his hand and Cass was lifted up off his feet and thrown across the cell. He hit the wall hard and thudded to the floor and when he tried to get up he couldn't. He couldn't move at all.  
  
"You gonna play the hero now? Hm? Knight in shining armor? Where was the chivalry when you were tricking some dumb cunt into letting you out? Weren't worried about her then, were you?"  
  
Asher got Tanya up off the floor and dragged her over and threw her against the bars. She stood pinned there with her eyes squeezed shut and Asher's hand on the back of her head.  
  
"See what I mean, Cass? You're not thinking about anything but Dean. If I told you that doing this..." He yanked the girl back by the hair and slammed her forehead against the bars. "Would get Dean back here, you'd be fine with it, wouldn't you?" He did it again and the girl cried out and her hands flailed and she dropped her shirt and her knees buckled. "Wouldn't you?" He pulled Tanya's head back a third time and Cass shouted, "No!"  
  
Asher stood there with one hand on the bars and the other fisted in Tanya's hair. She was staring at the ceiling and gasping.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Just let her go. Do whatever you want with me but don't hurt her."  
  
Asher smiled and released the girl and she staggered away with her hands on her head. Her eyebrow was split and bleeding.  
  
" _Dick_ ," she spat at Asher.  
  
"You see how she talks to me?" Asher turned on her grinning. "Get the fuck upstairs you stupid twat." She glanced once at Cass and then picked up her shirt and tottered across the floor and somewhere in the dark the basement door screamed open and slammed shut. Asher looked at Cass and shrugged.  
  
"These bitches. Impossible to keep in line."  
  
He came into the cell and picked up the bar and threw it out. He kicked the rest of the broken wheelchair out of the cell too. Then he opened up the trunk and stared down into it and shook his head, smiling. "You've been busy." He picked up the spokes and folded them into the palm of his hand and they disappeared. He held his empty hand up to Cass with a flourish and said, "Magic!" The lid of the trunk fell with a hollow boom. Then he came over and squatted down on his hams in front of Cass. He stank. His eyes were all white.  
  
"When I know it's time, I'll let you out. Not before. I don't care if it takes ten days or ten years."  
  
"We don't have ten years."  
  
"Ten years is but the blink of an eye to one like me. When you were Castiel, it would have been the blink of an eye to you too. Understand?"  
  
Cass turned his face away.  
  
"Understand?"  
  
"Just leave that girl alone."  
  
"I will if you do."  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Good boy."  
  
He stood up. Both of his knees popped like cap-pistols. He let himself out of the cell and picked up the chain and fastened the door and bolted the lock.  
  
When he was gone Cass could finally move. He curled up on the floor and then he turned over to face the wall. He put his hands over his face and then he prayed, for whatever good it could do. He felt wholly beyond the reach of heaven. When he couldn't pray any more he pushed himself up and set his back against the wall and sat there.  
  
* * *  
  
His next visitor was the man who'd been at the door the night he and Dean had first come there. The one Tanya had called Marcus. He came up to the locker with a steaming bowl in his hand and he looked at Cass for a second and then bent over and pushed the bowl through the place where the grille was missing. Cass glanced at it and looked at Marcus and didn't move or say anything. Marcus turned to go and then turned back and pointed at the bowl.  
  
"You better eat that," he said. When Cass didn't answer Marcus said, "You better eat that or Asher's gonna find a way to _make_ you eat that."  
  
"All right," Cass said.  
  
The man left and Cass pushed himself up the wall and went over and looked down into a bowl of spaghettios in orange sauce. He sat down cross-legged and picked up the bowl and began to eat. While he was eating Marcus came back with a can of Diet Coke and pushed that through the broken grille.  
  
"Thank you," Cass said. He tipped the empty bowl at Marcus. "Do you want to take this?"  
  
"Yeah. Push it through the slot."  
  
Cass pushed the bowl out and Marcus stooped and picked it up.  
  
"You gotta take a piss?" he asked and Cass shook his head. "You gotta shit?"  
  
"No."  
  
"Well, if you gotta piss you can do it in the corner. Try not to take a shit in there, cause I ain't cleaning it up."  
  
"Got it. Piss in the corner, no shitting."  
  
"That's right."  
  
He stood there watching Cass and Cass looked up at him.  
  
"Anything else?"  
  
"No," Marcus said, but he didn't leave. Finally Cass said, "You're Marcus, right?"  
  
"Yeah. I guess Phyllis told you."  
  
"Tanya."  
  
Marcus raised an eyebrow. "Yeah. Tanya."  
  
"She made it sound like you were a friend. If you're her friend, don't let her come down here again."  
  
"Damn straight I won't."  
  
"Is she all right?"  
  
Marcus shook his head. "Naw, she ain't all right. She's sick."  
  
"Sick? Did Asher do something else to her?"  
  
"Not that kind of sick, man. Girl's got the love bug. You all she talks about. What the hell happened down here?"  
  
Cass said, "I tried to use her to escape so Asher beat her up to teach me a lesson."  
  
"Whoo," Marcus said. "That sure ain't the way she tells it."  
  
"She probably has a concussion."  
  
"Her story is you wouldn't fuck her when Asher told you to and that you stuck up for her when he was slapping her around. That's what she says. That would make you about the nicest guy she ever met."  
  
"Then Tanya's had a very sad life."  
  
"You don't even wanna know."  
  
"I'm sure I don't."  
  
Marcus stood there like he wasn't going anywhere. Cass picked up the soda and pulled the tab and drank.  
  
"What's your story?" Marcus said quietly. "Why's Asher got you boxed up down here?"  
  
" _You_ don't even wanna know."  
  
"Try me."  
  
"I think you should go back upstairs."  
  
"What, you only talk to little girls?"  
  
Cass took another pull on the can and didn't answer. Outside the cell, Marcus crouched down to his level and put the bowl on the floor.  
  
"What do you know about the old man?"  
  
Cass started to push the empty can out of the cell and then he took it back.  
  
"I think I'll save this to piss in, if you don't mind."  
  
"Hey. I asked you a question."  
  
Cass looked up. "I know you work for him. That's all I need to know."  
  
"So what? Everybody's gotta work for someone. This is the first goddamn job I've had since oh-eight."  
  
"Well then, congratulations."  
  
"You know, you don't gotta be like that..."  
  
"What do _you_ know about him?" Cass said. "What do _you_ know?"  
  
"I know he's a fuckin pimp. Came into town draggin that girl with him like a damn dog. Moved in here...got the lights back on, running water in some of the rooms. Then..." Marcus paused in thought.  
  
"Then what?"  
  
"Then I don't know what. It was like he'd always been here. Like I'd never been anyplace else in my life either but the goddamn Cairo. Sometimes I have to work real hard just to know which end is up and even then I'm not so sure. Sometimes I think..."  
  
He put his head down. Then he sat down cross-legged like Cass.  
  
"My mother's people lived in Alabama. They was some real holy rollers down there. Shit. We used to go down there in the hottest goddamn part of summer and have to sit in that church without a damn lick of air conditioning every Sunday morning for two hours listening to the preacher and the choir and the whole damn congregation testify. My granny'd sit there all dressed up in her Sunday best with her Jesus fan flappin away, smiling like God's own breeze was blowin just for her. Me, I'm sitting there in a tie and socks and pants, sweatin like a damn pig. I'd always fall asleep and she used to _smack_ me with that Jesus fan. I mean she used to let me have it right across the back of the head and she'd say, 'Marcus, you stay awake and listen to the Word or the devil's gonna come for your soul.'" He looked up at Cass. "I think I should've stayed awake and listened to the Word."  
  
Cass stared at him.  
  
"Why did you just tell me that? What are you?"  
  
"What? What the hell does it look like I am?"  
  
"If I say Christo does that mean anything to you?"  
  
"No," Marcus said and his eyes stayed fixed on Cass and did not change. "Except it sounds like Christ, like Jesus Christ...is that what you mean?"  
  
"Close enough."  
  
"I knew it," Marcus said slowly. "I knew there was something different about you. I seen all sorts of people at The Cairo but I never seen that old bastard put his eye on someone like he's put his eye on you. You and that friend of yours that you came here with."  
  
"My friend..." Cass said, and then he stopped and shook his head. "You should go."  
  
"Asher's not here, not now. I got my eye on him too. I see his comins and goins, he don't even know it."  
  
"Do you..." Cass took a deep breath and said, "The train station. Why does he go to the train station?"  
  
"I don't know. I don't wanna know. If there's any place in Detroit worse than The Cairo it's that place. I've heard that sometimes it's dark like it's still empty inside and sometimes it's all lit up. A fella came through here a little while ago who said he'd been up there. He didn't say nothin else but he looked like he'd been to hell and back. He went up in one of the rooms and hung himself with his shirt. I wanted to cut him down and Asher made me just leave him there. You couldn't even go near that floor for weeks because he stank it up so bad."  
  
"Did my friend go to the train station? Did Asher take him there?"  
  
"I think so."  
  
Cass closed his eyes. He folded his hands together and breathed.  
  
Marcus said, "He's the devil, ain't he? Asher? He's the devil and we are all in hell."  
  
"No," Cass said, almost to himself. "The devil is in the train station."  
  
When he looked up Marcus was just staring at him.  
  
"God sent you here."  
  
"Marcus..."  
  
"That's why Asher locked you up. That's why he took your friend away."  
  
"Marcus, go back upstairs."  
  
"Tell me what I have to do to help you."  
  
"You have to go upstairs and forget that we talked."  
  
"No. No way, brother. You're the one. A lotta folks've been waitin on you."  
  
"No one's been waiting on me. You can't help me."  
  
"Yes I can."  
  
"Like Tanya?"  
  
"I'm not Tanya. She ain't even all there anymore, poor thing. I see a lot. I know a lot."  
  
Cass was shaking.  
  
 _Ask for the keys. Tell him to let you out of here_  
  
"Come on, man."  
  
"I can't," Cass said. "I...not yet. Please go upstairs. Please."  
  
Marcus sat outside the cell for another minute and then he picked up the bowl and got to his feet. He looked down at Cass.  
  
"You ain't seen the last of me," he said. "I may've fell asleep a lot but I still heard enough of that Word and Asher ain't the only one got his eye on you."  
  
When he was gone Cass went to the back of the cell. He sat down and drew up his knees and put his head on them and crossed his arms over his head and stayed like that for a long time.  
  
* * *  
  
He didn't sleep but he fell into a doze and in that state he was back in the room upstairs and he heard the noise throbbing in the belly of the place and the white light now stuttered on and off like a photoflash and he could see himself and Dean on the mattress and then he could not and then he could again and he tried to stop it or look away but he couldn't do either one. In this half-dream he understood that all men were equal parts angel and demon and that on the sixth floor the demon had done those savage things to Dean even as the angel had looked on horrified and helpless. He knew that this was what Asher called love because Asher was a demon only and so was ignorant of many things.  
  
The sound of his own name softly spoken roused him and he turned over and sat up. Asher was in his cell. He had pulled the steamertrunk against the bars and he sat on it with his palms upturned on his spread knees and his old-man's belly swelling out over the cracked belt of his trousers. There was a gray steel box between his bare feet.  
  
"What do you want?" Cass said.  
  
Asher sat in silence and stared down at the floor. One of the bulbs in the ceiling had burned out and the demon sat half in darkness, his nose casting a long shadow down over his chin. He put his foot on the box and pushed it toward Cass and in that brown halflight Cass saw or thought he saw that the nails on Asher's feet were claws, long and yellow and curved, and the joints of his toes and his heels were set with hard spurs of bone.  
  
"Take the box," he said. He pushed it closer. "Open it."  
  
The box was long and had a hinged handle on the front and Cass reached out and grasped it and pulled it to himself. He saw where the lid would flip up and he put his hand on the lid and looked at Asher. Asher was still staring at the floor but Cass could see that his eyes were white inside their hooded sockets. His hands on his knees were now taloned like his feet.  
  
"Open it," he repeated so Cass opened it and Asher said, "Pick it up."  
  
From the box Cass pulled not chains but a single length of chain. It seemed to go on and on so that he had to loop it between his hands. Each link of the chain was a bright silver oval and they chimed softly against each other and although the chain looked fine it was heavy as iron and hot and thrummed with the power of heaven that Cass had still not forgotten.  
  
"I can't touch it again," Asher said. "You see how it burned me?"  
  
Cass looked up and the demon was sitting on the steamertrunk with his arms outstretched before him and his human guise was little more than a caul or veil stretched shapeless over him. His hands were burned down to the bone, the black flesh curled and flaking. He set them back on his knees. He was naked and his penis hung like a dark twisted root between his thighs.  
  
"Still I took it," Asmodeus said. "The chain that bound Lucifer for thousands of years, I took it. Which of your brothers made this chain, Castiel?"  
  
"No one of them alone," Cass said. "But it was Michael who bound him."  
  
"Of course," Asmodeus said and grinned to himself. "I knew him, too. Spoiled brats, the lot of them. Michael especially, taking his toys and going home just because he couldn't get his way. They're all gone now, and good riddance. All but you. Do you think it's beautiful?"  
  
"It _is_ beautiful. It's the work of heaven."  
  
"So it is." He raised a clawed hand to his temple. "But put it away now, it burns my eyes."  
  
Cass let the chain down into the box, link upon silver link falling like water. He held the last length of it in the palm of his hand for a moment and then released it and closed the box. When he looked up he saw only Asher in his dirty suit.  
  
"You see, I told you the truth. I have the chain."  
  
"Please...tell me how to use it."  
  
"You'll know what to do when the time comes."  
  
"How much longer?"  
  
"A little while." He stood up and bent over and picked up the box and put it under his arm and when he turned to go Cass scrambled up onto his knees and grabbed the edge of Asher's jacket.  
  
"Asher, please...just tell me if Dean's all right."  
  
Asher looked over his shoulder and smiled.  
  
"I show you the glory of your lost heaven and you ask me about Dean."  
  
"If I didn't love him I would have left with all the others. Don't you understand that? Love isn't always a weakness. Sometimes it's the greatest strength we have."  
  
"Not for men."  
  
He gripped Asher's jacket in his fist. "I loved him before I was ever human."  
  
"You believe that?"  
  
"I _know_ that."  
  
"More's the pity," Asher said. He pulled his jacket out of Cass's hand and let himself out of the cell.  
  
" _Is_ he all right?" Cass pleaded, but Asher was gone.  
  
* * *  
  
After that he was alone. He knew that The Cairo must be carrying on as before all above him but from his cell in the basement he heard nothing. He paced and prayed and paced again. He studied the lock on the door as if there were any point to that. He sat down and closed his eyes and thought of Dean and tried to seek him out in his mind as he'd once been able to do, as he'd found Dean in hell without even searching. Dean's soul lit up for him like a lamp in all that black chaos. Now there was nothing. He put his head in his hands and dozed again and then he slept.

He dreamt that he and Dean were hitchhiking by night along a southern highway and the night was warm and drowsy and thick as it only ever is in that part of the country and in the dream a truck pulled up along the shoulder with its running lights all glowing and he could feel the heavy rumble of its engine in the blacktop under his feet and hear the chuffing wheeze of the brakes and Dean swung himself up into the cab of the truck as if he belonged right there at that moment and nowhere else. That ease of his that he always had in those days when the world had still been the one he'd always known and understood. The road and the night and miles of highway slipping off under the wheels and music on the radio and the hot summer night slipstreaming through the open window. Chasing headlights. Dean turned and held a hand down to Cass and his face was lit up in the glow of dashboard lights just like so many nights in the Impala and he held his hand down to Cass and smiled and said, _In all my ways, Cass,_ and Cass took his hand and felt it in his own so solid and real. He woke up with his hand curled into a fist, holding onto nothing.  
  
* * *

He heard the basement door open and he hoped it would be Asher but it was Marcus again. He came up to Cass's cell and stooped and pushed a bowl of clam chowder through the slot and followed that with a ginger ale.  
  
"Thank you," Cass said.  
  
"Welcome," the man answered. He had an automated rifle slung over his shoulder. He pulled up the folding chair and slid the rifle off his shoulder and sat down with the gun between his knees and watched Cass eat in silence.  
  
Halfway through the soup, Cass gestured at the gun and said, "I'm not planning a hunger strike."  
  
"What, this?" Marcus laughed. "This ain't for you. There was a pack of wild dogs just across the street, wanted to make sure they didn't get any ideas."  
  
"Wild dogs?"  
  
"Shit yeah. They don't usually come this close but these must've been hungry. You and your friend are lucky you didn't get ambushed on the way in."  
  
"Has it been like that since the army closed off the city?"  
  
"Hell no. There've been packs of dogs running around Detroit for years. All these empty lots, empty houses. It's Wild Kingdom out there."  
  
Cass nodded and went back to his soup and Marcus sat outside and watched him. He wished that the man would go away but he didn't. The only sound was the spoon clicking on the bowl. When Cass pulled the tab on the ginger ale the hiss of escaping air seemed as loud as a geyser going off.  
  
Finally Marcus said, "I ain't given up on you, you know. Anyone who receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet's reward."  
  
"I'm not a prophet, Marcus."  
  
"Well, you are _something_."  
  
Cass set the soda can down on the floor and looked at Marcus through the grille.  
  
"I'll tell you what I am. I'm nothing but trouble. If your offer of help is real, and not one of Asher's tricks, then you're putting yourself in danger just coming down here to talk to me. You may have some idea of what Asher is but..." He shook his head. "You can't imagine what he is."  
  
"I ain't afraid of that old bastard."  
  
"You should be."  
  
Marcus leaned forward. "Why?"  
  
Cass stared at him for a moment and then he said, "Because he is a demon. A very old demon, older than Satan. For all I know he may be older than God."  
  
Marcus sat back in the chair and didn't say anything. He sat there for a while and stared at the end of his rifle and then he said, "Well, I figured as much."  
  
"Then you should be afraid of him. He feeds on filth and cruelty and if you're not afraid for yourself then you should at least be afraid for that girl."  
  
"Hey, I wouldn't let _nothin_ happen to her."  
  
"If you tried to help me Asher would think she was part of it."  
  
"I could take her away."  
  
"He would find you."  
  
Marcus grinned slowly. "Not if he was busy lookin for _you_."  
  
Cass thought about that and almost smiled but then he just looked away and shook his head. Marcus sat up and slung the rifle back on his shoulder and when Cass pushed the bowl out through the slot he bent over and picked it up and said, "Well, I been at you for weeks and I aim to keep at you so I hope you like the sound of my voice," and then he turned to go and his tossed-off words echoed in Cass's ears.  
  
Cass said, "What?"  
  
Marcus looked back over his shoulder, "I said I hope you like the sound of..."  
  
"No...what did you say about weeks?"  
  
"That that's how long I been at you..."  
  
"What are you talking about?"  
  
"What're _you_ talkin about?"  
  
"Weeks...it...today was the first time you came down here."  
  
Marcus turned to face him. "No it wasn't," he said slowly.  
  
"Yes it was. Just a few hours ago, you came down here...you told me about your grandmother. In Alabama, when you were a boy."  
  
Marcus nodded. "Yeah. That was weeks ago. At least two."  
  
Cass got to his feet and came up to the bars and put his hands on them.  
  
"Are you lying to me?"  
  
Marcus shook his head and stared at him and then he said, "I told you how it is here. Sometimes you don't know if you're comin or goin. But I know damn sure today ain't the first time I talked to you."  
  
 _Time is different in Detroit these days._  
  
 _I don't care if it takes ten days or ten years._  
  
He felt as if he would faint or vomit and thought his legs would give out but he stayed on his feet and stared at Marcus. Even in those few moments he wondered how much time was passing, had already passed, and when he spoke his voice was so low he could barely hear it himself.  
  
"Do you know where Asher is now?"  
  
Marcus stood under the light of that single bulb and looked down at him, still as a statue in a church.  
  
"I know he ain't here."  
  
"Are you sure of that?"  
  
"Sure as my own name."  
  
"Do you really think you can get out of here with the girl?"  
  
"Hell yes. I been thinkin about it for a long time. We'll go south, where it's warm. Maybe to Alabama. Is Alabama still there?"  
  
"Nothing's like what it was. If you could make it to Kentucky, I have friends there, in the mountains near Mozelle. Tell them you were with Castiel in Detroit. Castiel and Dean."  
  
"Castiel and Dean."  
  
"Marcus," Cass said. "I have to get to the train station."  
  
"I know it."  
  
"You can help me? You're certain?"  
  
"Oh, I am," he said. "I am wise like a serpent and gentle as a dove." A slow smile spread across his face. "Told you I remembered that Word."  
  
* * *  
  
Another two days passed or so it seemed to Cass although he knew by then that two days could be two weeks or two years or some unfathomable and unbearable gulf of time. On the third day Marcus came down to the basement with his dinner and when he had pushed that through the bars he followed it with an MP7 machinegun in a shoulder holster and a pair of bolt cutters and Cass hid them in the trunk. He asked Marcus if he knew of any place in The Cairo where Asher went in private or where he kept his own things and Marcus shook his head.  
  
"I had a knife when I came here, like a hunting knife but bigger, and old, with a bone handle...have you ever seen it?"  
  
"No. If Asher's got it he locked it up tight someplace."  
  
"He had a chain, a silver chain in a box. You've never seen that either?"  
  
"No," Marcus said. "But there's plenty of places in The Cairo I've never been and don't wanna go. You damn lucky he put you down here and not in one of his hidey-holes. Angels must be lookin out for you, boy."  
  
"They must be."  
  
"Angels or not, I still say you shouldn't go up there alone."  
  
"You can't come with me, Marcus."  
  
"I'm not scared."  
  
"I know. But you need to get out of here. Put Detroit as far behind you as you can."  
  
"Hell," Marcus said. "Anybody with any sense did that thirty years ago." He smiled and then he got down on one knee and put his hand through the broken grille. "Give me your hand," he said and Cass knelt down and clasped Marcus's hand between his own.  
  
"I'll be gone after this," Marcus said.  
  
"I know."  
  
"I am gonna say every prayer I know for you. Make sure Tanya says em with me. I'm gonna pray right to my old granny. The devil himself'd be afraid of that woman, she was that formidable. Formidable. She'll be swattin imps right outta your way with that Jesus fan."  
  
Cass laughed but his eyes were wet and he held on tightly to Marcus's rough hand.  
  
"For a long time I thought God had just up and left us. Then I thought maybe there'd never been any God after all and we'd always been on our own. But I knew the minute you come in here that I was wrong and then I knew why God had put me in this place. You are gonna be all right. You are gonna do what God sent you to do."  
  
"I hope so. And I hope I see you again." He smiled. "Dean will like you."  
  
"I'll see you one way or the other. My father's house has many mansions. If I don't see you here I'll see you there."  
  
Cass nodded and put his head down and when he looked up Marcus was in tears.  
  
"Thank you, for everything," Cass said. "Be careful."  
  
"You too," Marcus said. "God bless you." He squeezed Cass's hand and then released him and stood up and he looked down at Cass for another moment and then turned and walked away and out.  
  
* * *  
  
Now he waited. He didn't know if it was day or night or how much time had passed since Marcus had left him but he knew that he must wait. By and by Asher came down and stood outside his cell and told him that Marcus wouldn't be bringing his dinner anymore and Cass asked what had happened to him.  
  
"He's run off. Took that little cunt with him, too."  
  
"Oh," Cass said, and stood there with his heart hammering. He prayed that the demon would not feel the terror coming off him in waves.  
  
"I didn't think he was fucking her," Asher ruminated. "But then I guess everyone was fucking Phyllis. Except you, of course." He paced away and then came back. "You know, I'm not insensitive to your plight. I can find a boy for you...or maybe someone a little older, yeah? Pretty face but a little rough around the edges. Would you like that?"  
  
"No I wouldn't."  
  
"Do you think this faithful abstinence runs both ways?"  
  
Cass shrugged.  
  
"I really don't give a shit."  
  
"Well, I guess that's good," he said, then added, "I saw Dean today."  
  
Cass pressed his lips together. He was sweating.  
  
"You did?"  
  
Asher nodded. "He's fine," he said and watched Cass through narrowed eyes. "They're taking good care of him."  
  
"Good for them."  
  
"Don't you want to know _how_ good?"  
  
Cass came right up to the bars and stared at Asher and said, "The only thing I want to know is when the _fuck_ you're gonna let me out of here so I can do my job and get the _fuck_ out of this shithole city. Understand?"  
  
Asher smiled. "That's good, Cass. That's very good. You keep that up."  
  
When Asher left Cass almost ran for the bolt cutters in the trunk. He forced himself to stay still. In a little while someone came down with dinner. A young man in his twenties, fair-haired and hazel-eyed. God only knew where Asher had found him. He was wearing jeans and a plain black t-shirt and he said his name was Daniel and when he put the food through the slot he left his hand on the tray so that when Cass reached for it their fingers touched and in spite of everything Cass almost laughed at the idea that Asher thought it would be so easy.  
  
"Daniel," he said and Daniel stared at him wide-eyed. He was very pretty. "Tell Asher not tonight."  
  
"What?"  
  
"I know why he sent you down here and you can tell him not tonight. Or not this morning or this afternoon or whatever it is." Then he let his fingers brush the young man's knuckles and he added, "But maybe sometime."  
  
Daniel smiled. He said, "All right."  
  
"All right," Cass said. When he'd eaten Daniel took the tray away and left and Cass went to the back of the cell and got down on his knees and prayed. For himself and for Dean and for all the world. To whomever might be listening. Then he opened the trunk and took out the MP7 in its holster and strapped it on and put his jacket on over it. The long-deceased Eunice gazed up at him from her ancient photo. He picked up the bolt cutters and closed the trunk and went to the door and he pulled up a little slack on the chain and broke it in one hard snap and caught it before it could fall. Then he let himself out of the cell. He walked to the far end of the basement and then turned where Marcus had told him to turn and saw the gutter-level window and the two cinderblocks beneath it that Marcus had left for him. He climbed up and pushed at the window and it rasped on rusty hinges and he pulled himself up and slid out onto his belly. He stood up in a narrow brick alley. The air was bitterly cold and tainted with the smell of metallic smoke. Yellow weeds grew waist-high around him and the ground was covered in trash and broken glass and rusted lengths of wire and iron frozen upright in brown pits of ice.  
  
He had been so long in the darkness of the basement that the light hurt his eyes. He looked up the narrow walls of the alley, past row upon row of blank and broken windows, and saw far above him a sky that was the hard blue of midwinter in that northern country and he knew that it had only been November, and early November at that, when they had reached Detroit and so he had been in The Cairo for months, not weeks. Two months at the least. He wondered if it was somehow still November at the train station, or if it was winter there too, or if it was some other time that was out of time altogether. At the end of the alley the street was white with brittle winter sun and he turned and made for it and so out into Detroit.  
  
* * *  
  
He felt brutally exposed in that icy glare and there was little cover. The streets seemed wholly deserted. A shifting veil of dry snow blew like dust across them and at the corner of Sainte Anne an old iron funnel jutted from the broken sidewalk, still venting the subterranean steam of some departed industry. The street was lined with low clapboard storefronts, some of them crumbling down into the sidewalk, barely any of them still retaining even a pane of glass or any sign of what sort of commerce might have once been conducted in them. Hugging the edge of shadow afforded by those buildings he came to the end of the block and as he paused to scan the cross street some motion caught the corner of his eye and he turned his head and looked into the dark cave of what might have once been a cafe or bar. There was an old man seated on a bentwood chair at one of the tables. He was wearing a suit and a straw fedora and his hands were resting on the table as if he were waiting for someone to come out from the kitchen and set his supper in front of him. A shaft of light fell down through the broken roof and filled the chair opposite the man and dust hung motionless in that light so that it seemed as if some spirit were seated there in deep study of its companion. Cass knew he had seen movement and yet the man was terminally still and so he thought his eyes must have tricked him for this man was nothing but a stiffened corpse. Then the man's hands twitched on the table and he turned his head to the window and looked at Cass. For a moment Cass stood frozen in the man's gaze which was absent of any expression save some bottomless despair. Then the man turned back to the shaft of light and now Cass could see that there was indeed someone or something there in that cafe with him and he turned away and left them both behind.  
  
The next corner gave him his first view of the train station and the tower that rose up above it. Michigan Central, abandoned decades ago and yet left to stand empty, untouched and untouchable. As if awaiting Lucifer's advent. A thing impossible to describe. It had no congruity with the landscape around it, the little derelict houses and weed-tangled lots cowered beneath its sooty hulk and even in that piercing daylight it stood nearly black as if it alone were in shadow. Cass could see right through every window of the tower to the blue sky beyond so that the building looked completely gutted and like no more than a skeleton of stone and steel, and yet it had a hideous life to it, however dark, that was entirely absent from the dead city that lay at its feet.  
  
Between himself and the back of the station sat the old railroad tracks that once fed into the place, raised up on a concrete highline. To approach the station by this route would have made him visible to anyone watching. Beneath the highline ran a tunnel supported by concrete piers and it was so dark that it seemed like there was no tunnel at all, only a black wall impenetrable by any light. Even when Cass was standing right before it he could see no daylight at its end although it could not have been more than fifty yards in length. A fetid smell of wet and rotting garbage came from it. Cass took the gun from its holster and stepped into the tunnel and the darkness swallowed him. The ground beneath his boots was strewn with debris and he had to make his way slowly with his hand against the wall and his eyes wide open in the dark and there was no sound other than the echo of his own steps and breath and yet he knew he was not alone in that place. He felt himself seen and noted but he did not stop and whatever was in there let him pass. When he stepped out of the tunnel he heard something shift behind him and then a sound of vomiting, pained and horrible and echoing upon itself in the blackness but he didn't turn around.  
  
He couldn't have been in the tunnel more than a few minutes but outside the light had already changed into the low and oppressive slant of late winter afternoon. Now the tower loomed up above him and he could see the arched rear windows of the train station and the peak of its gabled roof. There was not a sound, not even a sigh of wind. Here the chain-link fence was broken and he climbed through it and then found a gap in the old boards set up to barricade the station and he slipped between them and inside.  
  
He found himself on a crumbling ramp that led down to the station's main arcade. The great vault soared above him and the granite columns stood silent in their decay, covered in runic graffiti. The floor was drifted with snow and the day's last light fell through the high windows and tattooed a skeletal grid upon the white snow and the gray stone. There was no sign of occupancy, natural or unnatural, and he had no idea where he was supposed to go. A sudden terrible thought came to him that Lucifer was not here, that Dean was not here, that no one was here at all and that he had erred terribly in escaping from The Cairo. That he had after all behaved exactly as Asher had said he would and given no thought to anything except Dean and now he was alone in this alien place with no plan and no help, a fool deserving of whatever may come.  
  
He descended the ramp and stepped out into the arcade. The blank ticket windows gaped at him. The light at the windows grew dimmer and the shadows inside the station deepened and then some form slipped out from behind a heap of rubble and stood there watching him. It looked more hyena than dog, with a humped back and long pointed snout. It bared white teeth at him in silence. Cass shifted the gun in his hands and from across the arcade he could hear the dog begin to growl deep in its throat and then it suddenly tucked its bullet head between its shoulders and whined and slunk off into the shadows and Cass knew it had not retreated from him. He stood still for a moment and held his breath and when he turned Lucifer was behind him.  
  
"Thank you for helping me win a bet. I told Asmodeus you'd show."  
  
He had not laid eyes on Sam since long before Lucifer had taken him and he saw no change in him at all. He stood a few feet away in the dim twilight with his hands in the pockets of his jeans and his blue shirt open at the neck, not dressed for the cold and not needing to be dressed for it, at ease as if he had just run into an old friend in his own front yard.  
  
"He said you wouldn't but I always knew you had a thing for Dean." He shook his head and smiled. "Everyone had a thing for Dean. He's a charming sonofabitch when he wants to be, isn't he? That four months he was in hell were kind of a nice break for Sam. Not having that charming, pretty sonofabitch around all the time."  
  
"You're not Sam. You don't speak for him."  
  
"But I am Sam," he said. "And Sam is me. We are one. But anyway..." He gestured at the gun. "Would you like to shoot me?" He held out his arms. "Please, go ahead. Get it out of your system."  
  
"Not with this gun."  
  
"Oh right," he said. "Maybe with this gun." He reached behind himself as Dean would have done and pulled the Colt out from the back of his belt. Then he held it up to his temple and shot himself in the head. The shot boomed like an explosion in that vault and the echo was a long time dying. The walls were still ringing with it when Lucifer said, "Nope, not that one either." There wasn't a mark on him and he threw the gun down to the ground where it clattered like a toy. Then suddenly he was holding the MP7 and Cass was standing there empty handed and he took one stumbling step backward, certain he would be shot but Lucifer only turned the gun over in his hands and examined it.  
  
"This is very nice," Lucifer said. "German? Of course. You can always tell." Then the gun was gone and Lucifer rubbed his hands together and raised his eyebrows and looked up at the lofty ceiling. "What do you think of Michigan Central? It's a piece of work, isn't it? Can you imagine they just left all this here to rot?"  
  
"I'm not here for the architecture."  
  
"Of course not. You're here to see my brother."  
  
"I'm here for Dean."  
  
"Same thing," he said and then, "Cass, don't you at least want to _try_ and kill me? You were a fucking _angel_ , man, this is your _job_." Cass didn't say anything and Lucifer smiled and shook his head. "That charming sonofabitch. Ah well, let's go see him."  
  
* * *  
  
The windows on the top floor afforded a wide vista of the city now sinking into night. The last of the sun lay as a bloodred strip on the western horizon and the sky above it was purple edging to black. There were no lights in the city except fires burning for someone's warmth or just burning on their own. To the north at the river's edge stood the charred and blackened shell of the Renaissance Center, still sending a column of smoke up into the air.  
  
"That ugly piece of shit," Lucifer said. "I burned it myself. Renaissance my ass."  
  
"Where is Dean?"  
  
"Don't worry. He's on his way."  
  
They were in an empty ballroom on the highest floor of the tower. It looked as new as if no one had ever set foot in it before and it was quiet and smelled of fresh floorwax. The walls were corniced in gilt. Electric chandeliers glowed from the ceiling and were twinned in the glossy parquet beneath. The gallery wall of cathedral windows was all glassed and bordered with an ornate brass rail. None of this had been visible from the outside. Whether it even existed within the actual walls of Michigan Central could not be proven with any authority but it seemed to exist there and the seeming was the only reality left. They had not come up by any elevator or stairs, they had been one second in the rotting arcade of the train station and the next here and Lucifer stood beside Cass with his hands in his pockets and looked down at his city.  
  
"How do you think God feels about what men have done to the world?"  
  
He swept his hand out in a motion that encompassed the city and at the same time seemed to dismiss it as if with only one more gesture he could wipe it out of existence.  
  
"I came to Detroit because Detroit is everything I told God the world would be if he gave it to men. They raped this city. They raped the earth beneath it and the sky above it and the waters around it. They raped it and shit and pissed on it and burned it and then left it to die. Then they built a few glass towers and called it a renaissance. That's always their way, destroy everything they put their filthy hands on and then cover it up with some cheap glitz and reward themselves for it.  
  
"I came up through River Rouge on my way here, now there's a place to see. The greatest factory in the world was built there by one of mankind's greatest monsters, the one who finally figured out how to turn men into machines. And they loved it. They sent artists in to paint pictures of it, as if the hell on earth he'd created were itself a work of art. Damn. I wish I could've seen that with my own eyes but I was under lock and key back then. You know Cass, that was the worst thing about being in prison. Never being able to tell God, _I told you so._ " He grinned. "And now I don't even need to say it." He jerked his head at the window, at the smoldering ruins of Detroit. "God can see it for himself."  
  
"Lucifer," Cass said. "This apocalypse is yours."  
  
"This apocalypse began long before Sam Winchester let me out and you know it, and all the angels know it and God knows it."  
  
"And the virus?"  
  
Lucifer shrugged. "That just helped speed things up. It was a neat trick, wasn't it? But I didn't barricade the cities. I didn't send out the soldiers to round people up and burn them alive, healthy and sick alike. I didn't take to the roads raping and stealing and butchering whoever I came across." He took a deep breath and sighed it out. "I am so happy to be here to see the end of God's world. I will be the last one left. I will be the one to turn out the lights."  
  
Cass stood there in silence. He stared at Lucifer, at Sam. Finally he repeated, "Where is Dean?"  
  
Lucifer smiled, still looking out the window. "There's still some angel left in you, Castiel. That infinite patience."  
  
"Where is he?"  
  
"He's here."  
  
"You said we were going to see him."  
  
Lucifer looked at him. "Why do you want to see him? What do you think that will do?"  
  
"I want you to let him go."  
  
"Let him go?"  
  
"Yes. You don't need him. You said it yourself, you'll be the last one left. The world will die all on its own."  
  
"And you don't care about that?"  
  
"No," Cass said. "I don't."  
  
"My goodness," Lucifer said softly. "How you've fallen. Was he worth it?"  
  
"Yes. He is."  
  
Lucifer nodded. His reflection nodded in the windowglass.  
  
"Sam loved him too. Sam still loves him. He hated him because he didn't _want_ to love him. He wanted to be his own man. He was happy when Dean was gone and he was so ashamed of that. The one you called Ruby was one smart bitch. She got to him through his shame, not his grief. When Dean came back, she was delighted. Sam could barely live with himself and she made him feel like he had nothing to be ashamed of, and every reason to take raise himself up with pride. I only finished what she started. It was so easy.  
  
"I'd like to tell you that Dean is free to go but he isn't. It makes Sam suffer horribly to see his brother here and to understand at last how much he loves him. I enjoy that. And to be honest, I don't think Dean _would_ leave. All this time, I haven't restrained him in any way and yet he's still here. He thinks he's helping Sam by being here and I let him think that. He wants to be with his brother, Cass. If you love him you'll leave him here. I won't hold you. I have no argument with you and you have no power against me. You can go. I'll escort you out of the city myself if you like and after that..." He smiled. "Go where thou wilst."  
  
"No," Cass said. "I want to see him for myself."  
  
"You think I'm lying to you?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
Lucifer looked down at him out of Sam's eyes.  
  
"All right," he said. He began to walk away and Cass followed him and he stopped and looked over his shoulder. "You stay here." He turned and crossed the ballroom and went out the door and closed it behind him and Cass was left alone and in silence at the top of Michigan Central. Beyond the window the remains of Detroit consumed themselves in the night. Beyond that the whole world did the same.  
  
* * *  
  
He seemed to wait there for hours but there was no trace of dawn in the sky. Neither did he see any moon or stars. In all this time no one came. He tried the door but it was locked as he'd known it would be. There was no other way out of the room except the windows and it was eighteen stories to the ground and Castiel had been winged but Cass was not.  
  
He stood beside the door with his head back against the wall and his eyes fixed on the plastered ceiling and listened for footsteps but heard nothing. He understood that Dean might not come. That Lucifer might not come, that it could very well be that no one would come and he would remain in that room alone for all eternity while that night went on forever. He stood there and thought about everything Lucifer had said and knew at last that there would be no saving of this world. All illusion of that was stripped away. He didn't care if he died but he could not bear the thought of dying without seeing Dean again. Without trying to free him from this place, however he could do that. He remembered what they had promised to each other but now that he had come to it he knew that he would give himself up if doing so would save Dean. He felt himself back in hell and only Dean still stood out clearly, one last ember in the endless night.  
  
He heard his name and looked down from the ceiling and Dean was at the other end of the room. He was standing by the windows with his hand on the brass rail. He was not wearing the same clothes that Cass had last seen him in.  
  
"Dean?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Is it really you?"  
  
"Do you mean is there something else in here with me? No."  
  
"How do I know that?"  
  
"You can exorcise me, Cass. Do whatever you want. Here..."  
  
He took a piece of red chalk from the pocket of his shirt and drew a messy but accurate devil's trap on the floor. Cass stood there and watched him. Dean stood up and stepped into the trap and turned around in it and held his arms out and then stepped out.  
  
"See?"  
  
Cass stood there for another moment and then he crossed the room nearly at a run but when he reached Dean, Dean held his arm out and put his palm flat against his chest and said, "What are you doing here, Cass?"  
  
Cass stared at him. "What do you mean? I came for you."  
  
Dean shook his head. "You shouldn't have. You weren't supposed to."  
  
"What?"  
  
"You weren't _supposed_ to," he repeated. "I haven't done it," he said quietly. "I don't think I can. Sam is in there but I can't help him. I can _see_ him, Cass. Just a glimpse, now and then but I see _him_. He's in there. He's been in there all this time. But I can't...I can't get him out."  
  
"Then come with me. Lucifer said I could go, he practically said you could go too, if you wanted. He doesn't need either one of us."  
  
Dean smiled sadly and shook his head.  
  
"I'm not leaving him again. I'm sorry, Cass."  
  
"You're making it worse for him. Lucifer told me that's the only reason he wants you to stay, to make Sam suffer."  
  
"No. I have to stay. I have to find a way to help him. I didn't help him before. I did this to him."  
  
"He did it to himself!" Cass nearly shouted and Dean flinched and Cass said, "Dean...Dean, please..." and he reached up and tried to take Dean's face in his hands and Dean turned away and then Cass saw that his hair had begun to turn all gray along his temples and above his ears and he said, "My God...how long have you been here?"  
  
Dean looked at him. "I don't know. A long time."  
  
"What are they doing to you?"  
  
"Nothing."  
  
"Look at me," he said and grabbed Dean's arm but Dean pulled away.  
  
"They aren't doing anything to me. I'm just... _here_ , that's all." He looked at Cass and Cass stared into him and Dean turned away and put a hand to his head. "Stop that." His voice was shaking. "For Christ's sake, stop it. You're not an angel anymore, you can't trust the shit you see anyway."  
  
"You're going to die in here."  
  
Dean laughed and looked up at the ceiling.  
  
"I wish."  
  
Cass stood there and for a moment neither of them moved or said anything. Then Cass came to Dean and Dean didn't move and Cass got down on his knees and put his arms around Dean's waist and Dean stiffened up but Cass wouldn't let him go. He laid his cheek against Dean's stomach. He could feel Dean's ribs through his clothes. At last Dean put his hands on Cass's head and Cass tightened his arms.  
  
"You told me I had to end it," Dean said. "But I can't. The only thing I can do is stay here."  
  
"Then I'm staying with you."  
  
"No you aren't."  
  
"In all thy ways, Dean," Cass said. "I promised you."  
  
"He'll give his _angels_ charge," Dean said. "You aren't an angel. You can go now, Cass. I'm letting you go."  
  
"You can't do that. I won't go."  
  
"Yes you will."  
  
"No..." Cass said. He shook his head. Now he was crying.  
  
"Go back to Amy. Or look for Frank. Find someplace to be safe until it's all over. Maybe I can...maybe I can still do something."  
  
Cass looked up at Dean.  
  
"The chain...Lucifer's chain, I can..." But Dean clamped a hand over Cass's mouth and shook his head.  
  
"It's useless. He's in there, nice and snug. He's in my brother."  
  
"Dean, please..." Cass said and then he heard the door open behind him and he thought, _No, no no, not yet..._ and when he turned his head Lucifer was there. Asher was beside him. Asher's eyes settled on him for just one moment with such black contempt that Cass felt as if he could go mad from it and then Asher looked away and did not look at him again.  
  
"This is a touching scene," Lucifer said. "But it's time for you to go."  
  
He loosened his arms and Dean stepped away and Cass stood up and said, "No."  
  
Lucifer crossed the room and looked at Dean.  
  
"Dean, what do you want me to do with him?"  
  
"Let him go. Give him a weapon and ammo and take him out of the city and then let him go. He'll be all right."  
  
"Dean, no." He looked at Lucifer. "I'm not leaving."  
  
"You heard my brother," Lucifer said. "He _wants_ you to go, Cass. I know you have this...schoolboy crush on him, but can't you be a little dignified about this?"  
  
From the doorway Asher snorted. "A stiff prick has no dignity."  
  
"Oh," Lucifer said amiably. "Do you want to fuck him? Because by all means, have a farewell fuck but then really, you've got to go." He shoved Cass at Dean and he stumbled and Dean caught him. "Fuck him," Lucifer said. "And then get the fuck out of here."  
  
Dean held Cass by the arms for a moment and looked into his eyes and shook his head and then pushed him away gently.  
  
"Just let him go, Sam."  
  
"No," Asher said suddenly. "You let him go he'll just come back here sniffing around like a fuckin tomcat. You gotta teach him a lesson."  
  
Lucifer looked at Asher. He looked at Cass. Dean said, "Sam, don't..." but it was too late. Lucifer had seized Cass so quickly that he didn't know what had happened but he found himself on his back staring up at the ceiling and Lucifer was holding him up with both legs under one arm and with the other hand he was pulling off Cass's boots and socks and Dean shouted, "Sam, no!" and Lucifer held up his hand and Dean was hurled across the room. Cass thought he'd be thrown through the window but he struck the brass bar hard enough to shake it from end to end and his head snapped back and hit the glass and starred it and he fell to the floor stunned.  
  
"Asmodeus, what do you have for me?" Lucifer said and Asher stepped up and pulled from beneath his jacket something like a policeman's billyclub but shorter, a blackjack, wrapped in leather and he hefted it in his two hands and was ready to swing when Lucifer stopped him. He took the blackjack from Asher and turned to Dean and held it out.  
  
"You do it."  
  
Dean blinked. "No."  
  
"If Asher does it your friend will crawl out of here a cripple for the rest of his life. That's how he'll go out into the streets of Detroit. So I suggest you do it. Get up."  
  
Dean looked at Cass and then pushed himself up to knees and then to his feet. He crossed the room and took the club from Lucifer and held it in his hand and looked at it. Then he looked at Cass and Cass lay there and stared up at him and God. Dear God, how he loved him.  
  
"It's all right, Dean."  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
"I know. It's all right."  
  
"I'm so sorry," he said and then he raised the club and swung it and hit the soles of Cass's feet. The pain was beyond belief. His vision blurred and he heard himself shout but barely knew his own voice. Everything from his feet to his bowels seized up in pain. He thought he'd piss or shit himself or already had. And yet he knew that Dean had held back. Had held back tremendously.  
  
"One more," Lucifer said.  
  
"You son of a bitch."  
  
"One more or Asher does it."  
  
Cass's eyes were streaming with pain. He clenched them shut against the next blow and when it came he mercifully grayed out for a brief moment and then came back to himself in agony. Lucifer dropped his legs and his heels thudded on the floor. Pain like an electric shock. Then Dean was down on his knees at Cass's feet, putting on his socks and then his boots. Shaking, he pushed himself up on his elbows as Dean was tying the laces and before he could finish Asher hauled him to his feet. He could barely stand. Dean pulled him away from Asher and got his shoulder under one arm.  
  
"You all right?" Dean whispered. "You all right?"  
  
Cass nodded and closed his eyes and when he opened them they were back in the train station's deserted hall. Himself and Dean and Lucifer. Icy moonlight streamed through the broken windows.  
  
"Take him outside," Lucifer said.  
  
"I asked for a weapon and ammo," Dean said. "You said you'd take him to the city limits."  
  
"Fuck it. I changed my mind. He was pissing me off. Now get him the fuck outta here before I really fuck him up."  
  
Dean looked at Cass. His face so pale in the moonlight.  
  
"Can you walk?" he asked and Cass nodded and together they went out of the train station through the front entrance and into the street. Outside it was even colder than before. The wind had risen up off the river. Frozen snow crunched under them.  
  
"Leave him there," Lucifer called from the doorway. Dean turned around to look at Lucifer and Cass turned also and Lucifer threw something at them and it thudded to the ground at their feet. The MP7 machinegun. "There," he said. "That'll do for him."  
  
Dean bent over and picked up the gun and pressed it into Cass's arms. Cass clung to Dean's shirt with both hands.  
  
"Dean, Dean please...please..."  
  
"You have to go," Dean said. Tears were standing in his eyes.  
  
"No...the chain...there's still the chain..."  
  
"It's too late," Dean said. "Go to Amy. Tell her I fucked up and hide. Lay low. Maybe somehow you'll make it."  
  
"Dean..."  
  
"I'm sorry, Cass," he said and then kissed him. Cass twisted his hands in Dean's shirt and with the MP7 shoved up between their ribs and bruising both of them they kissed. Dean pulled away and bent his head. The gun nearly fell and he caught it and put it in Cass's hands and closed his fingers around it.  
  
"Go," he said and he turned away and he was gone. Lucifer gone with him.  
  
Cass stood there in the cold light. A cloud passed over the moon and the front of the train station went dark and illumined again.  
  
"No..." Cass said. His breath steamed out before him. "No."  
  
He ran across the snow and into the train station. The arcade was empty, ghostly in the moonlight.  
  
He shouted, "Dean!" and ran into the center of the hall. "Dean!"  
  
There was no answer. No one there. He stumbled around the perimeter of the hall and tried to find some way up into the tower but there was none. He shouted for Dean in the cold until from somewhere inside the station a dog barked. Then another. They came out of the shadows like shadows themselves with their teeth bared and their tongues lolling and he shot them. The shots stuttered like lightning and rang out deafening and the dogs who weren't shot ran off yelping into the darkness and Cass shouted for Dean and then fell to his knees with his arms over his head and howled Dean's name and in response from outside came a great uproar of dogs or hyenas or whatever beasts prowled the decayed streets of that haunted city and the anguished cries of all rose up as one into the night.


	3. River Rouge

When Cass got to his feet the dogs were returning. He could see them moving like sentient smoke against the walls of the train station. He backed across the arcade with the machinegun out and the dogs watched him from the shadows. The desolate hall was frozen in moonlight and the snow on the floor showed his own footprints and no one else’s. To all seeming no one but himself might ever have been there.  
  
He crawled out of the train station through the gap in the boards where he had entered. At the chainlink fence he looked back at the tower and it stood above him as dark and derelict as it had stood for more than twenty years and there was not a soul in the place. He came to the tunnel under the railroad highline and plunged into it with no hesitation. His boots slopped through whatever vile slurry covered the floor and he scrabbled blindly over piles of trash with his arms held out before him for bearings. He had almost reached the far end of the tunnel when something grabbed his ankle.  
  
"Hey," it said. "Hey, did you see him?"  
  
The man was withered, insectile, barely clothed and he was no man at all. His eyes were dead black and opaque in the sepulchral light. Cass kicked out his leg to shake him off but the demon held on viselike.  
  
"You see him? The big guy? He's up there, isn't he? Huh? He's up there?"  
  
Cass angled the machinegun down at him.  
  
"Get off."  
  
"Yeah, shoot me, go ahead." He wrapped his other shriveled hand around Cass's ankle. "Shoot me, come on do it."  
  
Without a thought Cass let off a burst of rounds and the demon let go and lay writhing in the muck.  
  
"I knew it," he moaned. "You can't kill me. You can't kill me."  
  
Cass turned away and walked out of the tunnel and began to mount the broken street and behind him the demon gibbered at the mouth of the tunnel as if it could not step out into even the moon's feeble light.  
  
"I wanna die you fuckin pussy! I wanna fuckin die!" Hideously, it started to weep. "I wanna die," it sobbed. "I wanna die."  
  
The moonlight faded but there was no sign of dawn, nor was it truly dark. The sky was black and a deep redness had risen in the south as if some immense holocaust burned just beyond the horizon but there was no sound of fire or hot gust or smell of burning other than the permanent smolder that hung over the city. In this charred darkness he made his way down Sainte Anne Street, lurching like a drunkard on his battered feet. He passed the cafe where he had seen the old man at the table and now the man was hanging from his neck by the beam over the door and his hat was on the ground and his hands hung at his sides, hugely swollen. On the corner even the steampipe had finally exhausted itself of whatever vapors it had been installed to disgorge.  
  
So he came back at last to The Cairo. He thought for a moment of entering through the basement window where he had escaped but there was no point to that secrecy. He came around to Matthew Street and stood where he and Dean had first seen the place together months if not years ago. The night before they had come to Detroit, the night before they had ever laid eyes on The Cairo, they had made love and slept beside each other with a sound of rain at the window and the pale curtain lifting into the room.  
  
No one was at the door and no bulb burned beside it. He looked up at the brick walls and mullioned windows and balconies and saw no light or movement or any sign of tenancy.  
  
"No," he said. He had somehow not expected this. "Oh God, no."  
  
He passed the fireblacked tree in its courtyard and went up the steps into the lobby. The elevator doors stood open onto a silent shaft. Neither the number three nor any light blinked above them. The quiet pressed upon his ears with such weight.  
  
"Asmodeus!"  
  
His own voice echoed in the dead floors above him.  
  
 _"Asmodeus!"_  
  
He called to him in Latin. In Greek. In long-dead languages and tongues that had never been spoken on earth. Unanswered he began to climb the stairs that he had ascended with Dean so long ago and he remembered how he had pleaded with Dean to leave although even then it had already been too late. Below him something shifted and he spun around and saw nothing and heard nothing. When he turned back Asher stood two steps above him and for an instant they stared at each other in the coalfire gloom and then Asher raised his arm and backhanded Cass across the face so hard that he was knocked off his feet and fell end over end to the bottom of the stairs. Asher kicked him and Cass rolled onto his side and tried to get to his feet and Asher booted him in the back and the pain was so sharp and sickening that Cass nearly vomited. He kicked him again and Cass heard and felt a rib or ribs snap in his side and then Asher took Cass's throat in both hands and pulled him up until they were inches apart.  
  
"Stupid _fuck_ ," he hissed.  
  
Cass had no breath in him. He grabbed Asher's wrists and tried to free himself. His feet were barely on the ground.  
  
"Stupid _fuck_ ," Asher repeated and then he bunched Cass's shirt in one fist and with the other he beat Cass in the face and then dropped him in a heap to the floor. His nose and mouth were full of blood. He rose up barely conscious onto his forearms and his blood spilled out black as ink onto the broken tiles and Asher seized him by the back of the neck.  
  
"Get up," he said and lifted him and spun him around and pushed him to the stairs.  
  
He staggered up the stairs with Asher's fingers clamped around his neck. Twice he fell and Asher jerked him up to his feet. The third time he couldn't get up anymore and he made the last flight of stairs on his knees with Asher dragging him by the scruff. Asher steered him down a hallway and Cass tried to look up and see where he was but he couldn't. Then he heard a door swing open and felt a damp rush of fetid air on his face and Asher pushed him into the apartment where the girl they called Phyllis had first brought him and Dean. He fell forward and couldn't get up and he knew he was going to die in this place. He lifted his head and saw the apartment unchanged. The lightbulb still hung on a wire from the kitchen ceiling, casting its gray pool of light. The filthy mattress sat on the floor. He could almost taste the air on his tongue, a noisome funk of sweat and sex and shit.  
  
"Was it the snatch who let you out?"  
  
Cass turned onto his side and pushed himself up. He braced one hand onto the floor and wrapped his arm around his ribs. Asher was standing at the window, a black paper cutout on a bloodred scrim.  
  
"Must've been the other one. That snatch couldn't have pulled it off. Retarded little bitch." He crossed the room and came to stand over Cass. "Why did you come back here? What did you think you'd find?"  
  
Cass looked up at him. He tried to answer but his jaw was broken and he couldn't speak.  
  
"Dean? Did you think he was here?"  
  
He reached down and caught Cass by the arm and dragged him over to the mattress and threw him on it.  
  
"There's your Dean, yeah? You smell him?" He pushed Cass's face into the mattress. "You taste him?" He shoved his hand between Cass's legs. "Getting hard? Huh? Are you?"  
  
"Listen..." Cass said at last. It was all he could get out through his clenched teeth. Asher let him go and Cass turned onto his back and Asher crossed his arms and stared down at him. The room wavered out of focus and Cass felt his eyes dip and he raised his hand and made some gesture at his jaw.  
  
"Can't talk? You were doing plenty of talking back at the train station. And down in the basement too. You must've really been running your mouth off."  
  
Cass shook his head. Blood slid down his throat and he choked on it and rolled onto his side and let it run out of his mouth because he couldn't cough. Asher bent over and grabbed Cass's head and Cass waited for Asher to break his neck and he closed his eyes and saw Dean so clearly, exactly as he had first seen him in hell when he had gone to raise him up, the beginning of his new life which was now at its end.  
  
The pain all throughout his body flared into blinding agony and Cass screamed behind his teeth and almost fainted and then the pain was gone. Asher threw him over onto his back and let go of his head and stood up.  
  
"There. Now talk."  
  
Cass opened his mouth and closed it. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth then pushed up onto his elbows and looked at Asher.  
  
"Lucifer said he'll be the last one left." Asher didn't respond and Cass went on. "He's going to take everything out...people, animals, demons too. Everything. Down to the last blade of grass." He stopped and swallowed. The taste of blood lingered coppery in his throat. "You won't be his servant. You won't be anything at all. You'll be dead."  
  
Asher squatted down on his heels.  
  
"Now," the demon said, "You begin to understand the situation."  
  
"You knew this?"  
  
"There were those like Azazel who thought if Lucifer were free he would raise up a kingdom where we would all be gods and all of mankind to serve us. Azazel," he said, "Was an idiot."  
  
"Tell me what to do."  
  
"I told you and you screwed me. What are we supposed to do about that?"  
  
"The firstborn son is with Lucifer. The fallen angel is here. You still need me, Asmodeus. Let me go after them."  
  
"Even unto hell, angel?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
Asher licked his lips. He smiled. Then he stood and turned on his heels and crossed the room and walked out of the door and slammed it behind him. Cass stayed where he was and in a short while Asher returned. The gray metal vault box was under his arm and he threw it to the floor. Cass heard the chain rattle inside and Asher heard it too and pressed the heel of his hand against the side of his head as if it ached and then he shook his head like a dog and told Cass to get up.  
  
Cass stood up and stepped to the box and Asher stopped him.  
  
"Take off your clothes."  
  
Cass stared at Asher. After a moment he shook his head in disgust and started to undress and Asher grabbed Cass's chin and forced his head up to look at him.  
  
"If I wanted to fuck you I would've done it the minute you walked in here. I would've fucked you inside out. Understand?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
Asher brushed a calloused thumb along his jaw.  
  
"Maybe later, yeah?" he said. "Business before pleasure." He let Cass go. "Now get undressed."  
  
* * *  
  
Asher had turned to the wall as if moved by some sudden courtesy. Naked, Cass stooped and lifted the chain from the box. He stood there and held it in both of his hands and it hung to the floor in loops of copper light. The last angel to wield this had been Michael and it should have been Michael who held it again, with Dean's hands. Cass could see his own human face reflected back in each silver link. He thought of Anna at the church in Knoxville, telling him that God did not make mistakes. He thought of himself, still an angel, standing in a child's nursery in Dalhart Texas and promising Dean that he would follow him to hell itself. It seemed to him that the will of God was immovable and undeniable and that all love and joy and hope and even pain and fear existed in and because of that will. Paths taken and not taken would all and only ever lead to the place where God had always meant them to go.  
  
"Put it on," Asher told him with his face still to the wall.  
  
Cass bent his head and draped the chain over his neck. Immediately he felt its weight settle into his flesh and blood and bones. He took the two slack ends and crossed them against his chest and then wrapped them around himself and crossed them at his back and brought them up and over his shoulders. The only sound in the room was the soft chime of link against link. He fed the lengths of chain down between his torso and legs and wound them around each thigh and up again and behind his back and across his belly and though the chain had neither catch nor lock he knew that when he came to its end it would hold and it did. It was so heavy.  
  
"Is it finished?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Get dressed. Tell me when you're done."  
  
He put his clothes back on and told Asher that he was dressed and Asher turned around and looked him up and down.  
  
"He won't be able to find you as long as you wear it. But that's the only protection it'll give you."  
  
"Then I need a weapon."  
  
"You can have the machinegun."  
  
"I need the knife too."  
  
Asher raised an eyebrow at him.  
  
"So that you can use it against _me_?"  
  
"I need you as much as you need me."  
  
Asher reached inside his suit jacket and took out the knife. He looked down at it wistfully.  
  
"It's a beauty. I hate to give it up."  
  
Cass put out his hand. "Give it to me."  
  
Asher shrugged and crossed the room and slapped the blade down into Cass's palm and Cass bent over and shoved it down into his boot where he had worn it since Dean had given it to him. He straightened up and looked at Asher and Asher said, "Lucifer has left the city and gone to the place called River Rouge. From there he travels freely between earth and hell. He may be in hell or he may still be in The Rouge."  
  
"If he's in hell how will I find him?"  
  
"Dean is with him. Did you have any trouble finding Dean the last time?"  
  
"I'm not what I was before."  
  
"Well then," Asher said. A slow smile spread across his face and then he turned away. He took one of the little blunt cigars from his pocket and popped a match with his fingernail and lit the cigar and sucked on the end. The match burned down to his fingers and he let it fall to the floor and then he looked at Cass. "I guess love will have to save the day after all."  
  
"I thought that was my weakness," Cass said. "Isn't that what you said?"  
  
"Yeah, that's what I said, but that was before you fucked everything up. I wanted to do this the easy way. I had Lucifer right where I wanted him, all I needed was time to get it right. Now you have no time. All you've got is that torch you've been carrying around all these years. Let it be your..." He looked up to the ceiling. "Your light in the darkness." He grinned at Cass. "Hmm?"  
  
"What about Lucifer? I can't bind him inside his vessel."  
  
"Don't worry about Lucifer, Sam's working that from the inside."  
  
"Sam? Sam has no power over him."  
  
"Depends what you call power. Sam has no control over him...Lucifer would know if he tried that shit. But see, Azazel -- idiot, like I said -- went too far. He doped that kid up with his own blood so much that he's been strong enough to hold on all these years even with King Shit running the show. So Sam _knows_ him, and Lucifer sure don't know _that_. He doesn't know that Sam's been watching him. Listening to him. He probably knows Lucifer better than that fucker knows himself." Asher shook his head. "He never knew himself. Ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag."  
  
Cass looked towards the windows. Some sort of sickly day was beginning to gray the panes.  
  
"This is hopeless," he said. He looked at Asher. "This isn't going to work."  
  
Asher took a step forward and put his thumb under Cass's chin and studied him. Cass could feel the coal-tipped end of the cigar burning next to his cheek. He could smell Asher's sulfurous rot.  
  
"Yet still you must do it," he said and he smiled, almost a fallen angel himself and so freighted with the ancient knowledge and bitter wisdom of all his kind.  
  
* * *  
  
Dean woke up from something that was more stupor than sleep and sat in a huddle and looked around him. He was still here and here was nowhere although he knew it wasn't the train station anymore. He didn't know how long he'd been here but then he didn't know how long he'd been there, either. Since he'd been left here he hadn't once seen Lucifer and there was some small relief in not having to see Sam still looking so much like himself and yet so wholly changed, but if he never saw Lucifer there was no hope of getting him out of Sam and even if he did he had no way to kill him or bind him and so in truth there was no hope of anything at all.  
  
He had thought at first that Lucifer had killed him in the train station after he'd sent Cass away. Though he had no memory of dying he was certain that he was in hell. He remembered the stink of it and he could sometimes hear it grinding away on the other side of these walls that stretched up to some black and shadowed height where he couldn't see anything at all. There was an iron door in one wall and once he'd gone and stood at the door and tried to listen for any sound on the other side and something had shot under the gap below the door and grabbed his ankle and brought him crashing to the floor and then wrenched at him as if it could somehow drag him whole through those few inches. His knee had jammed up hard against the doorsill and Dean had bellowed in pain and bloodied his fingers trying to find some purchase to pull himself free and then the thing had let go of him so suddenly that Dean's forehead slammed on the floor. He had pulled his leg in and spun around and scuttled backward from the door and seen his leg clawed up to the knee and spiraled around with friction burns and on the other side of the door something sniffed and sniffed and then bony fingers appeared in the gap and felt their way around blindly. Dean had gotten up and gone to the door and then stomped on the fingers with his heel and the thing had shrieked and retreated. Since then he would sometimes hear whispering outside the door and he knew that if they wanted to come in they would come in, and whatever they wanted to do with him they would do, just as they had for forty years. But no one came in.  
  
After a while he began to understand that he was still alive because he would sleep and he had never slept in hell. At first he had also been hungry but that had passed and he knew it had passed because now he was starving. There was a tap in the wall and water or something like it came out of the tap but he'd had nothing to eat for longer than he could remember and the awareness of his own starvation made him realize he was still alive if nothing else did. With that came the knowledge that in spite of everything he had tried to do he was just going to starve to death in this nameless corner of hell while somewhere, the world went on with its dying.  
  
His bones ached and he shifted but could find no relief. His leg burned. He was thirsty and he looked at the tap. It was on the other side of the room. High up in the wall above it was a grilled window that seemed to look out onto sky though the light neither waxed nor waned but was always the same sulfured gray. Dean sat there and stared at the tap. A drop of water appeared at its lip and hung there shimmering before it fell to the floor and slipped down the drain. He heard it descend all the way down some pipe that went God only knew where. Another one took its place and also dangled for a moment and then followed the first.  
  
 _That's it,_ Dean thought. _I'm going over there._  
  
He thought if he stood up he would fall over but he wasn't going to crawl, not yet. He pushed himself up and waited for a wave of faintness to pass and then he made his way across the long room with his shoulder against the wall. He got down on his knees and turned the tap and it creaked and rust flaked from it and it coughed out a sudden burst and then a thin trickle of yellow water began to leak from it. He collected it in his hands and drank. It smelled and tasted terrible but it was water and he'd always heard that dying of thirst was worse than starving to death. He turned off the tap and sat against the wall and caught his breath. He thought about staying there but the tap was close to the door and he didn't want to be close to that door and from here he couldn't see the window. Such as it was, it was still a window. After a while he got up and crossed back to the other side of the room and then he just sat there. He thought about Cass and told him again that he was sorry and he hoped that Cass had listened to him and left Detroit and gone back to Amy but for all that he wanted to believe Cass was safe in Kentucky in truth he knew that Cass was dead. Lucifer or Asmodeus or some nameless monster had killed him for Lucifer's sport as soon as he'd left Michigan Central. He closed his eyes and saw Cass's bones in a heap on the broken pavement outside the train station and he pushed the image away and slipped into a black haze.  
  
When he came to himself Lucifer was sitting next to him. Dean startled so hard that his head rapped against the wall. Lucifer didn't move. He sat there with Sam's long legs drawn up under his chin like a gargoyle and studied Dean.  
  
"Long time no see," Dean said at last. Lucifer didn't say anything. The room was deathly quiet. Dean could hear his own pulse in his ears. "Something on your mind?"  
  
"Why aren't you dead?" Lucifer said.  
  
Dean pondered the question. "Nine lives?"  
  
Lucifer narrowed his eyes and cocked his head. "Why haven't I killed you yet?"  
  
Dean stared at him. After a moment he said, "I don't know, Sam," and Lucifer slapped him hard across the face.  
  
"Don't talk to him."  
  
"Sorry, Sammy," Dean said and Lucifer slapped him again. Dean smiled and put his hand up to the corner of his mouth. He was bleeding. "Touched a nerve?" he said, but when he looked up Lucifer was gone.  
  
He came back some unknowable time later and he crouched next to Dean and picked up Dean's wrist and wrapped his hand around it until his thumb and middle finger met.  
  
"You're starving," he said.  
  
"Yeah, that tends to happen when you don't eat."  
  
"What do you want to eat?"  
  
"Oh, I don't know. Bacon cheeseburger, medium. Grilled onions. Side of fries."  
  
"Here," Lucifer said, and there it was. On a white plate, the meat so hot it was still sizzling. Dean started to tremble. He could have wolfed down the whole thing, plate and all.  
  
"I can't eat that," he said.  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"Because I'm starving, genius. I eat that, it's gonna come right back up."  
  
"Try it."  
  
Dean looked at the plate. He looked at Lucifer. "Is that...what kind of meat is that?"  
  
Lucifer frowned. "It's beef. And bacon. Pork. What do you think it is?"  
  
"I don't know...kittens? Babies? Soylent Green?"  
  
Lucifer raised his eyebrows. "No, it's just plain old cows and pigs. Go on." He put the plate down on the floor.  
  
Dean looked at Lucifer for another moment and then he picked up the burger and took a bite out of it. He had to close his eyes and just hold it in his mouth because it was so good. He was nearly in tears. He chewed it very slowly and then swallowed it. He sat there and waited. In the corner of his eye Lucifer watched him. Nothing happened and then a jolt of pain hit his gut and he doubled over.  
  
"Oh Christ," he said through his teeth. He pressed his forehead into his knees. "Oh fuck."  
  
He sat there in a frigid sweat until the spasm passed. When he opened his eyes the plate was gone.  
  
"Try this instead," Lucifer said and handed him a thick cup with a spoon in it. Dean took it and stirred it. Tomato soup with rice.  
  
"Your mother used to make that when you were sick."  
  
Dean stared down into the cup. The white grains floated and sank. His vision trebled and he blinked and nodded.  
  
"Sam?" he said but he was alone.  
  
The next time Dean woke up he knew Lucifer was there even with his eyes closed. He had the feeling he'd been sitting there watching him for a long time. He opened his eyes and saw Lucifer crouched in that same gargoyle pose but his hands were clamped around his knees so tight that the knuckles were white and straining and Dean sat up slowly and watched Lucifer watch him.  
  
Finally Lucifer said, "Michael."  
  
After a moment Dean said, "What about him?"  
  
"You. You were supposed to be Michael's vessel. This..." He reached out and took Dean's arm. "This was owed to Michael."  
  
"Depends who you ask."  
  
"Why did you say no?"  
  
"I didn't think meat suit was a good look for me?"  
  
"Why you?" Lucifer said. He put a finger under Dean's chin. "Why this? Out of all the billions of people why did Michael want _this one_?"  
  
"I don't know," Dean said. "Why did you want my brother?"  
  
"He was claimed for me by my servant Azazel."  
  
"Mmm, yeah. The name rings a bell."  
  
"Who claimed you for Michael? Who prepared you?"  
  
"You're asking the wrong guy," Dean said but Lucifer wasn't listening to him.  
  
"Michael," he said. "Michael's vessel. Michael's chosen."  
  
He reached down suddenly and grasped Dean's wounded leg and Dean tried to bolt up but Lucifer put his other hand on Dean's chest and stilled him and said, "Don't move," and then he looked at Dean and said, "That's better."  
  
Dean looked at his leg. He looked at Lucifer. "Good as new," he said. He stared at Lucifer with his heart hammering. He could hear hell outside the walls. He could smell it on Lucifer's clothes. Lucifer had not killed him and had not let him starve and had kept him apart from the legions of hell and Dean was suddenly more afraid than he'd been in a long time.  
  
Lucifer stood up so abruptly that Dean caught his breath and braced himself but Lucifer just stared down at him and then he turned and crossed the room and went out through the door and only when Dean heard the bolt hammer down on the other side did he finally let out his breath.  
  
* * *  
  
Dean heard him on the other side of the door and then he heard the bolt and he was already on his feet when Lucifer came in and he pressed his back to the wall as if it would protect him but before the door had even slammed shut Lucifer was across the room and he grabbed Dean by the throat and drove his head into the wall and hit him so hard his knees buckled.  
  
"Michael's vessel," Lucifer said. He hit him again. "Michael's chosen."  
  
Lucifer beat him until his vision swam. He couldn't feel his legs. When Lucifer let him go he collapsed on the floor and he rolled to his side and looked up and saw Lucifer bending over him and he pushed up onto his elbows and tried to get away from him but there was no place to go and he knew what was coming next. When he was face down on the floor with Lucifer on top of him he realized that he had somehow thought that because this hadn't happened already it wasn't going to happen and yet here it was and nothing he could do about it. He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his forehead against the floor. It was some kind of rough concrete and he could feel it abrading his face, his legs, his clenched fists. When Lucifer was done he put his mouth to Dean's ear.  
  
"See?" he said. "What Michael wanted, I have."  
  
Dean looked at him over his shoulder. "Yeah? All you've got is what a whole lotta demons got for forty fuckin years. Real lowlifes too," he laughed, "Not big shots like you."  
  
Lucifer stared at him. For a moment Dean thought Lucifer was going to kill him but he didn't and Dean hoped he would pass out this time but that didn't happen either, though it went on and on.  
  
When Lucifer finally got up off him Dean couldn't move. He lay there and listened to Lucifer pull up his jeans and zip and buckle himself.  
  
"It's okay, Sam," he said. "I know that wasn't you." He was shuddering and he turned onto his side with some effort and drew up his knees. "It wasn't you."  
  
Lucifer didn't say anything and Dean thought he had gone. When he opened his eyes he saw Lucifer standing in a stoop with his arms hanging at his sides and his face blank. Dean raised himself up onto his arms.  
  
"Sam?" he said softly. Then even more softly, _"Sam?"_  
  
Lucifer turned his head and looked at him, but it was not Lucifer. It was Sam and yet not altogether Sam, a person sleepwalking through some nightmare separate from yet not heedless of the waking world.  
  
"I won't let him, Dean, never...I won't..."  
  
"Sam...Sam, listen..."  
  
"Not again, I won't..."  
  
"It's Michael," Dean said and Sam fell silent and stared at him.  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Michael is the way out. Michael's vessel. Me."  
  
Sam nodded and covered his face with his hands.  
  
Dean said, "Sam, look at me."  
  
When Sam put his hands down Dean looked at his brother and said, "Should I say yes to him? Is that what I need to do?"  
  
"Not yet."  
  
"When?"  
  
Sam clenched his jaw and swallowed hard. "Not yet. You'll know."  
  
"All right," Dean said. "All right, Sam."  
  
"I won't let him..." Sam made a vague gesture that took in the room, the whole awful scene. "Do this again."  
  
"Can you stop him? Without him knowing?"  
  
"I don't know."  
  
"Then don't risk it."  
  
"Dean..."  
  
"Don't risk it. I don't care. It'll all be over soon anyway."  
  
Sam blinked and his eyes were wet and he was shaking.  
  
"I have to go."  
  
"I know."  
  
"I'm so sorry, Dean."  
  
"I know that, Sammy. So am I. I'm sorry I..."  
  
Sam had closed his eyes. He rose up to his full height and when he opened his eyes Dean knew that Lucifer was here. He didn't look at Dean. He turned around and walked right out through the wall. After a while Dean got up and went to the water tap and cleaned himself as well as he could. He drank handful after handful of water. Then he got dressed and went to the corner and lay down and stared at the window, up at hell's unchanging sky.  
  
* * *  
  
In some pale and wasting daylight Cass stood on an iron railroad trestle and looked down upon River Rouge. The air was still and very cold. Rising up on his right was the flat round hulk of a fuel oil tank and beside that a rusting blast furnace and some great pile of debris that had begun to coagulate into one solid and mountainous mass. To his left, the river half-frozen and smoking, and all before him a wasteland of railcars and sludgepits and the derelict constructions of the old complex. Nothing moved. Ashen snow began to fall. Cass took a deep breath and let it out steaming before him and he reached down and checked the knife in his boot and then straightened up and secured the machinegun on his shoulder and the weight of chain under his clothes shifted and settled. The last time he had gone down into hell for Dean he'd done so with no weapon save his own grace and no doubt that he would find the one he sought and no reckoning or even care for who that one might be. For just a moment longer he stood there and then he stepped down off the bridge and went on.


	4. Fallen and Firstborn

The snow on his face was dry and not cold and Cass stopped and turned his palm up and saw it was not snow but cinders, pale and fine as dust. When he raised his eyes he no longer saw River Rouge. The landscape was the same yet all different. The veil was so thin here that he had passed through it with no sign. To his left now a vile river of gray sludge rolling in its courses. Before him a valley of ashes.   
  
On the horizon under a featureless and louring sky lay Lucifer's city, raised up from these wastes when he was first cast out of heaven. Here he had reigned until restless he led his armies against God and it was Michael who drove him back and who struck the blow that wounded him, Michael who bound him with the chain that Cass himself now wore and imprisoned him beneath his own infernal city where he had festered for uncountable centuries until all the seals that held him were broken, the first by one unlucky brother and the last by another, neither of them knowing what he had done and yet both of them accountable for it before heaven.   
  
Cass went on.  
  
* * *  
  
Since the one time that Sam spoke to him Dean had not seen Lucifer again. He began to think he had imagined it or that Lucifer had tricked him, or worse yet that Lucifer had realized Sam had come through for that one brief moment. He had time to think about these things because he was always alone. From time to time someone came to the other side of the door and shoved food under it and whoever or whatever that was he never saw nor did he want to see.  
  
Finally he became so desperate that when he heard footsteps he went to the door and stood beside it where he could call out but not be grabbed like before.  
  
"Hey," he said. The steps halted outside the door. "Tell your boss...tell Lucifer I want to see him."   
  
He held his breath and listened. He heard a soft shuffling and then a joint of meat shot under the door and the steps passed away and it was quiet. Dean stood there and looked at the meat. He couldn't tell what it had come from. He picked it up and bent over and sent it flying back the way it had come.  
  
"Tell him to get his fuckin ass down here!"  
  
 _Yeah, that'll work,_ he thought, but he had nothing else. He had gone to Detroit expecting to fight and die and instead he had gotten this futile captivity in a shapeless gulf of time that could not be fought or outsmarted or escaped and he sat down on the floor and waited for Lucifer or Sam or whatever might come.  
  
* * *  
  
By the time Cass came out of the wasteland night had fallen. It didn't descend slowly the way night did on earth, rather the day such as it had been moved all at once from that shadowless sulfur light into darkness and just the same Cass did not so much enter the city as it seemed to rise up around him of its own accord and surround him as if he had always been there and nowhere else. The machines of commerce and industry ground away in this city in the service of hell's own monstrous enterprises. Cass made his way through a tangle of streets hemmed in by sooty walls and past doors that gaped open onto ugly hallways and flights of stairs glaring under lamps that reeked of sulfur and crude naphtha and whatever other fuels could be mined from hell's depths. In the streets and behind these walls damned souls and devils and hell's creatures toiled in bondage to infernal occupations or loitered in an anxious and idle despair that was nothing like leisure. Cass remembered none of this from before. He'd been an angel then and he had never walked these streets. Yet there was a dreadful familiarity to all of it and Cass realized that this city could almost have been Knoxville or Birmingham or Baltimore or any of the desperate places he'd been with Dean in these last years that Lucifer had made a hell of earth.  
  
There was a terrific stench of filth and shit and all the corruptions of the body that remain in hell although the bodies themselves have long passed away and the damned ate and pissed and shat and puked and fucked and writhed in their own waste. Now and then one would pause and stare at him as he passed. Some of these still looked human and some were halfway to becoming demons themselves and some were almost entirely changed. Cass felt horribly exposed among them. The chain around him burned under his clothes and seemed to grow heavier from their presence.   
  
"You're not you," a voice said to his left and he turned his head and saw something vaguely human but indecipherably male or female sitting on a stoop with its long and crooked hands dangling between its knees and he only glanced at it and kept walking and it called out again, "You're not you," and when he looked behind he saw that it had gotten up and was following him.  
  
He turned down an alley that seemed empty and that stank of rotting meat. The brick walls on either side glistered with oily slime. He walked faster and stooped and pulled the knife from his boot and heard the thing coming up behind him and he turned around and faced it.  
  
"Go back where you were."  
  
"I was nowhere."  
  
"Don't follow me."  
  
"You stink," it said. "You stink like fresh meat and blood and it's so _good._ "   
  
It took a step forward. Cass stepped back.   
  
"It's so _good!_ " it repeated and then it launched itself at him like a spider and knocked him to the ground and its eyes were dead black and its teeth were sharp as if filed and it shrieked, "It's so GOOD! It's so GOOD!" and it was already inhumanly strong. It pinned Cass's wrist to the ground. "No knives, we have teeth!" and Cass got his knees up and shoved it off and staggered to his feet but it held on and threw down on him and they fell together again to the ground.   
  
"Just a little fucking _taste_!" it panted and then it tore at Cass's shirt and then suddenly there was smoke and a stench of seared hair and skin and it fell back screaming and clutching its hand. "What is that? What the fuck is that?"  
  
Cass rolled away from it gasping and looked down at himself and saw the chain exposed.  
  
"What is that?!"  
  
Cass buttoned up his shirt and his coat over that. He looked down at the demon still writhing on the ground.   
  
"Get out of here," he said to it. "If you tell anyone what you saw I'll burn you to cinders."  
  
"Fuck you!" it spat. It scrabbled up onto its feet. "Fuck you, I'm gonna tell _everyone!_ You fuckin come down here with some shit! I'm gonna tell everyone!" It turned and began to sprint to the end of the alley screaming and Cass watched it go and almost let it go and then he ran after it and it heard him and turned around with its face twisted in fury and Cass stabbed it in the throat. Its eyes and mouth blazed orange and it stared at him for one astounded second and then it fell to the ground all black and burst apart like spent charcoal.   
  
Cass stepped back. His boots were covered in soot. The chain weighed on him like cast iron.  
  
"Dean," he said. He looked up at the greasy walls. The black coffinlid of sky. "Where are you?"  
  
He stood there for another moment and then turned around and started walking. He had no scabbard for the knife so he put it in his belt. He looked back once and saw that the pile of ashes had begun to shift and blow away and then he didn't look again.  
  
* * *  
  
Dean waited for something to happen but nothing did and no one came. He thought about how he had asked Sam if he should say yes and let Lucifer have him for a vessel and Sam had said not yet, but now it seemed that he'd only had that one chance and had let it slip through his fingers. He wondered what had happened to the rest of the world and thought that by now it was probably gone. That no one had been saved. Giving in to Lucifer would not have destroyed or imprisoned him or changed anything but Sam at least would have been free. He could have done that, since he'd been able to do nothing else.  
  
He began to see things. People who couldn't be there. He halfway knew that he was hallucinating but they all seemed real enough. His mother. Chuck. Amy from Dalhart. He waited to see Cass but he didn't and he was glad because he didn't think he could bear to see him. Sam did come and this Sam was still a little boy and he was barefoot and crying because he was so cold and his feet were all red, the toes already gone dead white with frost and when Dean reached out to him he simply melted away and left Dean sitting there in such helplessness and regret that he could do nothing but put his head down on his knees and weep.  
  
He slept and woke and slept. He dredged up half-remembered song lyrics and recited them out loud. He walked the walls of the room over and over. He had almost nothing to eat. He waited to die and thought he might be so crazy by then that he wouldn't even know death when it came.  
  
At last he heard something come to the door and stand there. It was so quiet Dean could hear its breathing but it made no other sound and after a while he thought he was hallucinating this too. Or that whatever it was had come to kill him or take him out into hell to finish off what was left of him. He pushed himself up the wall and watched the door and waited and then from beside him Lucifer said, "Dean."  
  
Dean startled and stumbled backwards and Lucifer reached out and caught him and steadied him on his feet. His hand on Dean's arm was very real.   
  
"We're going to take a little walk," Lucifer said.  
  
Dean stared dumbly at him and didn't know if this was Lucifer or Sam or something he was imagining altogether. Finally he said, "Where?"  
  
"You'll see." He held out his arm and there was a coat over it. "Put this on, you'll need it."  
  
Dean took the coat and looked at it and Lucifer waited for him and Dean stood there and closed his eyes and then looked at Lucifer and said, "I know what you want."  
  
"What do I want, Dean?"  
  
"You want me," Dean said and Lucifer raised an eyebrow and a corner of his mouth twitched up in a smile and Dean said, "Not like that. You want me..." He made a gesture at himself. "This. What Michael wanted."  
  
"Where did you get that idea?"  
  
"From you. The last time you were here."  
  
"When I fucked you."  
  
"When you beat the shit out of me."  
  
"Hmm," Lucifer said. He looked away and nodded thoughtfully and then looked back at Dean. "Well...will you give it to me?"  
  
He hadn't expected anything so direct. He thought he'd lost his chance and here it was again. Asher had told him he'd have to get Lucifer out of his vessel to chain and imprison him but Asher wasn't here and the chain wasn't here. Sam was.   
  
"Dean?"  
  
 _Not yet. Sam said not yet and he said I'd know. I don't know anything but it's not going down like this. This prick doesn't get to leapfrog from Sam to me and just walk away._  
  
"Nah," he said. "I'll pass."  
  
"Yeah, I didn't expect you to cave that easy. Not even for Sam."  
  
"Leave him out of it."  
  
"Can't be done, Dean," Lucifer said and then he laughed and held out his arm and said, "Come on, brother. Walk with me."  
  
* * *  
  
It was the first time in God only knew how long that Dean had been out of that cell and the air felt shockingly fresh to him and very cold. Tree branches rose up bare and black against a dusky sky. Frozen snow hung from evergreen boughs. Dean felt ice and forest duff beneath his boots and the air was sharp with pine resin and frost and fire. A smell of meat, roasting.  
  
He hadn't walked any real distance in so long that he couldn't keep up with Lucifer striding ahead on his brother's long legs. The frigid air sliced through his bony frame and burned his nose, his throat. He had no gloves and he stuck his hands into the sleeves of the coat. His breath steamed out before him. He heard Lucifer halt and he stopped and looked up and saw him at the top of a rise, silhouetted against the red winter sunset.  
  
"Where are we?"  
  
"Come up here and see."  
  
The rise was low but he was out of breath and twice he had to bend over and grab some root or branch to pull himself up. He reached the top and stood beside Lucifer on a stone overlook above a wide river spanned by a steel-towered bridge. On the other side of the river lay a dark city whose banks were lined with barges and these were lit with floodlights and set with chimneys that fumed heavy black smoke into the cold air.   
  
"Do you know where this is?"  
  
"Yeah," Dean said. He was looking south and far down on the island across the river he could make out the spire of the Empire State Building reflecting the last wintry sunlight from the west but otherwise dark against the deepening sky. "New York," he said. "Manhattan."  
  
" _That's_ New York," Lucifer said. "But we're nice and safe up here. You wouldn't want to be down there." He pointed across the river. "Do you see those barges, Dean? Do you know what's happening in them?"  
  
Dean nodded. "It's QC. They're burning people to keep the virus from spreading."  
  
"No, they aren't," Lucifer said and Dean looked at him. "They're burning everyone."  
  
"I know. They stopped trying to sort out the crotes a long time ago."  
  
"No, Dean. They're burning _everyone_. There is no Quarantine Control. There is no National Guard. There's nothing. The demons are doing it on my orders and the people helping them know they're demons and they're going along with it anyway. They think if they side with the winning team they'll come out on top when it's all over. A whole new world with plenty of swag for whoever's left."  
  
"That's..." Dean shook his head. "That wasn't happening before."  
  
"This isn't before. You've been away a long time. You were there for the beginning of the end. This is the end of the end."  
  
Dean looked out over the river. Barges lined up side by side and smoke churning from each. Too many to count. Now he could hear generators roaring away to keep those lights and crematories going. And screaming. Fainter than the generators, a thin sustained buzz that was almost insectile but hideously human. How many people would it take to make a sound like that audible from so far away?   
  
Behind him, Lucifer said, "If you won't give yourself for Sam, will you do it for all of them?"  
  
"You would stop this."  
  
"I would."  
  
Dean looked up at him.   
  
"Letting the world off the hook isn't your endgame."  
  
"Maybe the game's changed."  
  
"Maybe you're a fucking liar."  
  
"Even the damned don't lose all their virtue. I'd be open to a fair trade."  
  
Dean stared at Lucifer, ruddy in the sunset, untouched by the cold. He looked down at the river and the smell of burning came up the river on a gust of wind. Burning meat, burning flesh. That high whine of screams.  
  
"What's it gonna be, Dean?"  
  
Dean closed his eyes. He shook his head.  
  
"You can make me see anything you want," he said. "I remember _that_ from when I was in hell. This could be...satanic CGI for all I know. Fucking smoke and mirrors..." he said and he opened his eyes and he wasn't up in the Palisades anymore and Lucifer wasn't with him and the screaming was not faint and the smell of burning flesh was not on the wind but all around him.   
  
They were shoving people into the barges with payloaders and backhoes and some of the people were naked and some barely dressed and some so battered they were already dead and he was among them. Those who still had the strength were screaming wordlessly without prayer or entreaty, and others were trying to claw their way over the bodies as if they could find a way up and out but the machinery kept moving on and on, pushing a mountain of human meat into the incinerator.  
  
He was swept up in a tide of weltering bodies. He tried to free himself but there was no way to do it. He saw the last of the sky and then he was in the barge with countless others and they were surging against the walls and weeping and howling in terror. He saw reinforced nozzles all along the ceiling of the barge and the other people saw them too and they began to crush down to the floor of the barge as if that would save them. There was a strong smell in the air. Butane gas and machine oil. The doors slammed shut and there was no light at all and he was lifted up and turned over and shoved under someone and tossed up again and all the while trying to grab onto something, anything, and then the nozzles came on in great gouts of flame and the noise reached a crescendo beyond anything he'd ever heard, even in hell. He tried to turn himself away but there was nowhere to go and then the fire covered him in a blanket of flame and he screamed and mindlessly twisted up like an animal to shield himself and then suddenly it was quiet.  
  
It was quiet and he was lying in the snow contorted with pain. His whole right side was immolated. He was not screaming. He could hardly take a breath through his cooked lungs. He tried to roll his right side over into the snow and couldn't. The stench of his own burning hung around him.   
  
"Did that feel like CGI to you?" Lucifer said softly and at that Dean lurched to his feet. Only his left eye worked and all he could see were the vague shapes of snow-crusted trees now in darkness and he didn't know what he was doing only that he had to get moving. He staggered blindly through the woods.  
  
"Where are you going, Dean?" Lucifer asked conversationally.  
  
He fell to one knee and pulled himself up on a tree trunk and pushed on.  
  
"Dean," Lucifer laughed right behind him. "Come on, Dean. You should see yourself."  
  
"God," Dean groaned through his teeth. "Get the fuck away from me."  
  
"I think God got the fuck away from you a long time ago," Lucifer said and Dean turned around to see where Lucifer was and he overbalanced and fell against a tree. He wrapped his good arm around the snowy trunk and clung to it desperately as if it offered some supernatural deliverance. He thought he was crying but he didn't know. He didn't know anything.  
  
"Dean," Lucifer said, not laughing now. "Enough playing around." He grabbed Dean's right arm and then Dean did scream. He felt the skin and muscle on that arm crumple down to his wrist like a sock. He turned his head and saw his bones white as chalk beneath the ruin of his own flesh and then he passed out.  
  
* * *  
  
It was full dark now but Lucifer could see. He squatted on his haunches and stared at Dean lying senseless in the snow. Dean's right eye was cauterized shut and the rest of him that was not against the ground was burned beyond recognizing. He wondered whether his own brother would have known him and knew that of course, he would.   
  
Dean didn't come around. After a while he started breathing faster until he was hyperventilating. Lucifer could hear his pulse rise up in a rapid staccato and then sink and then speed up again. Everything inside him was shutting down, lungs, kidneys, guts, brain, but the heart was still furiously trying to salvage this body. This chosen vessel of Michael. Archangel of the Lord, prince of heaven, Michael of the thousand armies and the sword of adamant and the unbroken chain. In five minutes or less this vessel of the vengeance of God would be nothing but rotting meat.  
  
Dean started to shudder and then to seize. Lucifer could feel him slipping away. Seconds now, only seconds, and Lucifer waited until the last one and then he reached out and laid his hand on Dean's head and Dean went still. When Lucifer took his hand away the place where it had been was healed. He came forward onto his knees and put his hands on Dean and moved from his head to his feet, picking off burnt scraps of clothing as he went and casting them aside. Then he sat back and looked at his handiwork. Dean hitched in a sudden breath and his eyes fluttered open and Lucifer touched him and said, "No, no," and he went out again. Lucifer sat for a while in deep meditation. The snow fell on them both, righteous and wicked alike.   
  
Suddenly Lucifer bolted forward and turned Dean onto his back and straddled him and pulled him up to stare at his face. Dean's head fell back. His eyes were a quarter open and rolled up to white. He threw Dean down on his belly and tore off what was left of his clothes and when he was done he stood up and stripped until he was also naked and then he knelt down on the ground and shoved Dean's legs apart and fell on him and thrust into him. He grimaced and sawed his hips back and forth and then withdrew just as suddenly and sat back on his heels. He was panting and he threw his head up to the black sky and bellowed but felt no relief from that either. He lay down on Dean again and opened his mouth and pressed his teeth into Dean's shoulder until the skin broke and blood burst into his mouth. He closed his eyes and lay there and sucked and swallowed and then he just lay there. Then he stood up and wiped his mouth and stepped over Dean and went to the edge of the overlook. He stood there naked and gazed out at the dark river and doomed city for a long time.  
  
* * *  
  
Cass turned onto a street thick with fog that stank of low tide and damp rot. Heavy stone piers and a gaunt iron trestle rose up above him and Cass could hear a hollow sound like wheels passing ceaselessly over some roadbed that was lost in the mist. He came to a deserted avenue. A fire burned in the distance and a dripping streetlamp far down the avenue stuttered with yellow light and someone was standing below it watching him.   
  
He stepped back into the shadow of the street with his hand on the butt of the knife and he stood there for a moment and listened and then he turned to go back the way he'd come.   
  
From behind him: "Castiel."   
  
He stopped and turned around. She was at the corner now. She was no more than a silhouette but he could see that she was tall and her hair was long and hanging over her shoulders and she was booted and dressed in some sort of belted coat and she stood with her hands in her pockets and waited for him to answer. When he didn't she said, "Castiel, I know who you are."  
  
"Who am I?"  
  
"You're the fallen angel. I've been waiting for you."  
  
"Have you?"  
  
She walked toward him. Her heels clicked on the wet concrete. He pulled the knife from his belt and shifted it in his hand and she stopped and laughed.  
  
"That won't work on me. You think I'm some demon riff-raff?" She took something from her pocket and flicked it open and a blue flame sprang up in her hand and she held the light to her face. "Do you know me now? I'd think all angels would." She smiled. "Especially fallen ones."  
  
Cass studied her and at last he said, "I know you."  
  
"You're in the presence of royalty. Can I at least get a curtsey or something?"  
  
"I would bow to you?"  
  
"Angels," she said. "Fallen or not, always up on their high horse."  
  
"What are you doing here?  
  
"My father brought me. One of the first things the fucker did when he got out. "  
  
"Where is he?"  
  
"I don't know."  
  
"Why don't you leave?"  
  
"Where would I go?"  
  
"Can he find you?"  
  
"He could if he wanted to. But I've heard he has someone new to play with."  
  
Cass took a breath and held it and then he said, "Do you know what Lucifer did with him? Do you know where he is?"  
  
She shrugged. "He could be anywhere. Down in the mines. In the pit. But I think Lucifer's keeping him close. I know the story, Castiel. This friend of yours was supposed to be Michael's vessel, wasn't he?" Cass nodded and she said, "My father has a jealous streak and he always thought his brother got better toys than he did. Michael wanted your friend so now he does. It doesn't have to make sense. He's just going to throw tantrums until he gets what he wants."  
  
"And if he doesn't?"  
  
"He's a spiteful prick. He'll just break what he can't have." She shook her head. "I don't envy your friend. Attracting my father's attention is a terrible thing. I would know."  
  
"You're really working against him."  
  
"Oh, yes."  
  
"I don't believe you."  
  
"I've never been a liar, that's Lucifer's department. There's nothing more honest than Sin." She stepped closer and studied him. "I'm sure you learned that the hard way. I can tell so many of my boys have left their mark on you. Pride. Envy." She leered. "Lust."  
  
Cass ignored her. "If you don't know where they are then how can you help me?"  
  
"I've been watching you. You already had one throwdown, how many more do you think you can have before you really start getting noticed? This is my old neighborhood, I know it better than anyone and I'll get you through it."  
  
"Why would you do this?"  
  
She looked at him with the light phantom blue on her white face and then she snapped the flame shut and turned her back on him.  
  
"Come with me," she said and began to walk away. She stopped at the corner and looked around and said, "Come," and then went on walking. Her heels echoed. Cass stood there for another moment and then he put the knife away and followed her.   
  
* * *  
  
Dean woke in a rictus of cold almost as painful as fire. He couldn't move. He could barely open his eyes. When he did he saw snow and pine needles. He lay there and made himself breathe and finally he forced himself up onto his forearms. He felt snow slide off his bare back. He didn't know where he was. He raised his head and saw Sam wrapped up in a great woolen coat before a campfire. Wood crackling and sparks whirling up into the night sky. He looked around for the car but he couldn't see it and he had no idea why they were camping out in the middle of winter. He thought he was naked and that made no sense at all. He almost called out to Sam but the idea suddenly terrified him and he stared at Sam and at the burning fire and his memory came back to him all at once and he closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the cold earth. When he looked up Lucifer was standing over him and he moaned and turned his head aside.  
  
"Easy, Dean," Lucifer said. "Come on, let's get you warmed up."   
  
He tried to shove himself away but he was too cold to do it. Lucifer got him under the arms and raised him to his knees and then to his feet. He couldn't stand on his own. Lucifer put an arm around him and walked him over to the fire. His legs were insensate stumps. He stared down mutely at his right arm.  
  
"No burns," Lucifer said. "I took care of that for you."  
  
He was lockjawed from the cold. He could barely hold onto a thought. Lucifer brought him over to the fire and got him dressed. The clothes looked like the ones he'd been wearing in the fire but he couldn't tell. They were not burned. Lucifer sat him down on a rock and took off his own coat and wrapped it around Dean's shoulders and now that Dean's blood was moving again he began to shiver terribly.   
  
"Drink this," Lucifer said and put something in his hands. A heavy mug of white china, a diner mug. He must have drunk out of hundreds of mugs like this in hundreds of diners. Black steaming coffee inside. He was shaking too hard to hold it and Lucifer knelt before him and wrapped his own hands around Dean's and then bent his head and blew on the coffee and looked up with a smile.  
  
"It's hot," he said. "I don't want you to burn yourself."  
  
He would have told Lucifer to go fuck himself but he was beyond any such bravado so he just closed his eyes and drank. It was the best coffee he'd ever had in his endless life. He sat spellbound by the warmth. A deep exhaustion seized him and he was nearly asleep when he was roused by the feeling of Lucifer drawing his bare feet into his lap. Lucifer's hands were very warm and Dean sat there and stared at him. He remembered Cass rubbing his feet in the cold room in Kentucky where they had first slept together. Months ago? Years?   
  
At last he said, "Stop that."  
  
"Remember when you did this for Sam? That winter in North Dakota when you missed the schoolbus? You were the best big brother."  
  
"I remember," Dean said. "You don't. You stole that out of my brother's head."  
  
"I'm still Sam, Dean."  
  
"No you aren't."  
  
Lucifer smiled kindly. He held Dean's feet between his warm hands.  
  
"This isn't what you expected, is it? Let me guess, you thought there'd be a big showdown. Everyone going out in a blaze of glory, something like that?"  
  
"I don't know," Dean said, "I sure didn't think I'd be in New Jersey getting a fuckin footrub from Satan."  
  
Lucifer laughed and for a moment he looked so much like Sam that Dean felt a surge of hope that this _was_ Sam again. Then Lucifer said, "I want you to listen to me, Dean. I'm going to tell you how it is," and Dean knew his brother was not here.  
  
He said, "I think I've got a pretty good idea."  
  
"No, you don't. I was going to kill you when Asmodeus first brought you to me in Detroit but I didn't. Now I know that I spared you because you were Michael's chosen. Of course he wanted the firstborn son for himself. But he didn't get you because I was meant to succeed where he failed. When I face him I'll be in the vessel that he chose but couldn't have. The firstborn son that _I_ deserve. He'll know at last what I've always known. That I am better, and that he is nothing. That he was always nothing."  
  
"Got some issues there?"  
  
"Don't we all?"  
  
"Well, I didn't say yes to Michael and better or not? I'm not gonna say yes to you."  
  
"You will."  
  
"You gonna set me on fire again?"  
  
"I've kept you safe until now," Lucifer said and Dean snorted and Lucifer dug his fingers into the soft tendons behind his ankles and repeated, "I've kept you safe. If you don't say yes I have no use for you. I'll turn you out into the pit and they'll tear you to pieces."  
  
"So I die. Big deal. About fuckin time."  
  
"What do you think will happen to you when you die?"  
  
"I don't know. I don't really give a shit."  
  
"I do know. And so do you. You know what you deserve." Dean looked at Lucifer and Lucifer held his gaze. "You opened the first seal, Dean. Have you forgotten?"  
  
Dean didn't answer. Then he said, "No."  
  
"You started all this. You know that, right?"  
  
Dean closed his eyes. He nodded.  
  
"Then you were supposed to end it but what did you do instead? You said no to Michael and you abandoned your brother. You let him come to me."  
  
"He called me once," Dean said. "Once, and then he went to Detroit and you were waiting for him, weren't you, you son of a bitch."  
  
"You let him come."  
  
"I went to Detroit for him. For him. I went for you, Sam."  
  
"Too late, Dean. Too late."  
  
Dean stared at Lucifer. A knot of wood burst in the fire and sent up a geyser of orange sparks that landed in his lap and winked out, one by one.  
  
"The first seal. Your brother. And now the whole world. You see what's happening down there. I gave you a closeup look so you wouldn't forget it. Deny me and the blood of the whole world will be on your hands. No angel will raise you up from perdition this time. Do you understand, Dean?"  
  
Dean nodded. "Yes."  
  
"So what's your answer, Dean?"  
  
He looked down at the river. At the barges. He bit his lip in desperation until he tasted blood. Not yet, Sam had said. The real Sam. _Not yet._  
  
"No," he said. He turned back to Lucifer. "No deal."  
  
Such vicious hatred crossed Lucifer's face that Dean suddenly knew what he must look like stripped of his vessel and then it was gone and there was only the shell of Sam in front of him again.  
  
"That's all right," Lucifer said. "For now. But I'm going to get what I want, Dean. I always get what I want."  
  
"Did you get what you wanted down in the hole all those years?"  
  
"Yes, I did. I got out." Lucifer smiled. "Thanks to you."   
  
His smile widened into a grin and his teeth were white in the darkness and the fire reflected back coal red in his eyes and the wind came up off the river with the stench of burning flesh and the screams of the dying on it and then the Palisades and the city and the winter night were gone and Dean was back in hell. There was still snow in his hair and a taste of hot coffee in his mouth and his ankles were tattooed with the bloody crescents of his brother's nails.  
  
* * *  
  
She took him down the avenue where the fire in the distance had now dimmed to a gasworks smolder and they walked beneath streetlamps rusted from the damp and pitted with age and some that were lit and many that were not. She turned at last and went up the stairs of a brick building that reminded Cass of the freight office in Knoxville where Dean had nearly died. There were only runes scratched into the glass above the door where a name or address should have been. She held the door open for him onto the cold vestibule and then they went down a narrow corridor and up the stairs. On the third floor he followed her down a hallway with yellow walls and a floor tiled like The Cairo's plundered lobby. The doors on either side were painted black and had no numbers or other markings. A large cockroach ran along the floor and he could hear the papery brush of its body against the wall and then it turned and squeezed itself under a door and this was the door she opened to usher him into a decrepit room. She closed the door behind him and he looked at the place. In the center, an iron bed with a sagging mattress and tangled sheets. A black wooden dresser against the wall. A green wingchair. By the bed a lamp flared with that same oily stench and the wall above it was scorched black.  
  
"As you can see, I'm much reduced in circumstances," she said and then she turned to look at him. "Let me see it."  
  
"See what?"  
  
"The chain."  
  
"It's hidden."  
  
"I need to know that you have it. I need to see it."  
  
He said nothing and didn't move and then she said, "Show it to me or you're on your own."  
  
Cass studied her. Neither of them spoke. After a moment he laid the machinegun down at his feet. He took off his coat and undressed and when he was stripped to the waist he stood there and looked at her and she stared at the chain and then she came over to Cass and raised her hand.  
  
"Don't touch it. It'll burn you."  
  
"I don't care," she said. She put up her hand and stroked the silver links and even that light touch seared her fingers. Cass could smell them burning as he could smell all of her.  
  
"Is it heavy?" she asked. "Does it burn you too?"  
  
"Yes," he said.  
  
She smiled. "If you were still a true angel, it wouldn't. It would be as light and cool as water." Then she said, "I was there. I saw Michael strike him." She ran her hand up her own right side from hip to neck. "Sheared him open and chained him and locked him up. You should have heard him howl. I escaped into the world after that and man has never been rid of me. It was the least I could do, for all the help God gave me."  
  
"That isn't what the angels say when they talk about Sin."  
  
"Well," she said. "History is written by the winners, isn't it?" She smiled bitterly and said, "I was heaven-born. Lucifer made me in his own image, long before he fell. No angel had ever done anything like it. I was...wondrous. So much that he wanted me for himself and he hounded me and lied to me and spread me open and had me."  
  
"You never asked for God's help."  
  
"I had to ask for what should have been offered?" she said. "No. I wouldn't. Not then and not ever. When Lucifer fell he took me with him to this place. I was already huge with his first litter. His seven disgusting sons. They've done their father proud all these years, haven't they?"  
  
Cass didn't answer. He knew this story, but had never heard it from its origin and first witness. He didn't think any angel ever had.  
  
"Hundreds followed after those seven. Not all of them my father's, of course. I was always open for business." Her mouth twisted up in a smile. "The last four were the worst of all. You know them too. All angels do, and men. They run riot now over the whole earth and consume it at their father's will. Their father and mine."  
  
She stepped back and turned away from Cass and crossed the room to the black dresser and she stood there with her back to him and poured herself a drink and Cass watched her and there was something so familiar in the scene. For a moment he didn't know what it was and then he did.   
  
He'd been to earth only once before he was charged with Dean and he remembered the year and the place had been 1932 and Kansas City. There was a man who was going to be attacked by a robber and the robber had a knife and would have killed the man but Castiel had been sent to stop this. He didn't know then who the man was nor did he know to this day. He stood on the corner where this crime was going to take place and as he stood there he watched a woman get off a streetcar and go up into a place named the Hotel Coronet and then he saw a light come on in a third floor window and it was the same woman. She stood sallow-faced under the harsh electric bowl in the ceiling and took off her hat and went to the dresser and set her hat down on it and poured herself a drink, as this other woman was doing now. Then she just stood there. Castiel was able to see her back and her reflection in the dresser's mirror. She was wearing a dark blue dress with a frayed and shabby collar of some ruffled material and she stood there and stared at herself and Castiel watched her. Then it was as if he could see every room in that place and every resident and every one of them alone or as good as alone and he felt no pity. Only scorn that these creatures should so lack the grace of God. That they should be so bound to Sin. He had thought no more of it and he had saved the man and the man had laughed and called him his guardian angel and he'd had very green eyes even under the dim city streetlights of those days. It would not be for very many years that Cass would understand that men's kinship with Sin was their means to grace, and that as Anna had once told him this made them above the angels and closer to God and so uncommonly loved. Now here was Sin herself and her loneliness was so like all of theirs in this room not unlike those rooms in the Hotel Coronet in Kansas City in 1932. And Cass did pity her.  
  
She turned to him with her drink in her hand.  
  
"He ruined me and now I'll ruin him," she said. "I'll see him wear that chain again." She put her hand on her belly and for the first time Cass noticed that it was swollen beneath her belted waist. "And deliver him one last son to be a comfort in his exile and a companion through eternity. You'll help me do this?"   
  
"Yes," Cass said. "I will."  
  
She grinned ferally and then she downed the drink in one draft and turned to pour herself another and Cass picked up his shirt and put it back on and then his coat.  
  
"What should I call you?" he asked. "Do you use the old names?"  
  
"No," she said. "Call me Mary."  
  
Her back was to him but still he could hear the mirth in her voice.   
  
* * *  
  
Dean was dreaming and in the dream he was up on a high place and Lucifer was at his side and he wasn't Sam but his true self. Dean knew that this was Satan as he had crawled up from prison when Sam had released him. He was covered in burns from the chain that had bound him for so long and he stretched out his fireblacked arm over the plain that lay below them and told Dean to look. They were so high that Dean could see for miles and for miles he saw people running in terror and a great shadow followed them as if some invisible hand were drawing a curtain down fast, and this was indeed what he was seeing, the end of time and the world, the eternal darkness, and the hand that drew it was not invisible but belonged to the one standing beside him.  
  
"You've done this," Satan said. "Do you see?"  
  
He looked at Satan and then he looked back at the plain and now he could see among all that multitude and even from this height one woman running with a little girl at her side and the woman was naked and bleeding and the little girl clung to her hand and together they looked back and saw the shadow descending and the woman fell to her knees and pressed the girl's face against her shoulder so that the child wouldn't see the end and in the dream the darkness covered them and the whole world with them.  
  
Dean woke from the dream shuddering with his hands clenched into fists and he sat up and stared around himself and then turned to the wall and pressed his face against it so that he'd know he was awake, though it hardly mattered for the dream was not just a dream but what was to come. What was to come if he didn't stop it and he knew only one way to do that.   
  
He sat in silence for a while longer and then he stood up and began to call for Lucifer.


	5. This Pendent World

It is that hour when the country lies nightbound from one ocean to the other and in the darkness Lucifer walks. He passes the dead towers of one city and the smoking ruins of another and there are hardly any lights left for him to outwalk and he is alone in his travels and goes forth as one long acquainted with the night.  
  
Through the cities and towns, in the mountains and deserts and plains, he carries with him a shroud of stillness but he has left chaos in his wake in too many places to number. In New York they are burning everyone they can round up and in Memphis they are hanging witches in the name of Jesus Christ and in Los Angeles so many people have been shot for looting that their bodies are piled in the streets like dead cattle. Soon a man with special keys and special codes will decide the time has come to purify the world with fire as God once purified it with flood and this man will go under the ground and unleash that fire until the burning veils the sun forever and this pendent world once poised in the heavens like a jewel from the hand of God is nothing but a crumbling rock in the frozen silence of space. But there is still time for that.  
  
The morning is a long way off and this sun's rising will be among the last of its race. In darkness he comes again to Detroit where Asmodeus has been commissioned and is not permitted to leave because Lucifer would know where his allies are and by his own hand so few of them are left. This Asmodeus who now calls himself Asher is a creature who tired of God so long ago that Lucifer has some peculiar trust of him and he has come to Detroit because it was Asher who brought Michael's vessel to him and who spoke Michael's name in his presence for the first time in uncountable years.  
  
_No use to you at all, Michael's vessel?_ Asher said as he stood on the roof in his yellow feet and shabby suit. At the end of Lucifer's arm hung this vessel of Michael, completely still and ready to die. He was wounded and Lucifer could hear his blood spattering drop by drop onto the broken pavement seventeen floors below the abandoned tower of Michigan Central.  
  
Lucifer turned to Asher and cocked his head to show that he was listening and Asher shrugged and said, _You don't want to throw out something you might need later,_ and then he said, _The way Michael needed it._  
  
And there were three of them on that roof, angel, devil and man. Angel, devil and vessel. Lucifer, Asher and Michael. Lucifer and Michael. Michael.  
  
Some spark kindled in Lucifer's breast and he pulled Dean back onto the roof and stared at him and Asher also came around to look and to whisper in his ear like they say the snake in the garden once whispered to Eve while she slept and although Lucifer was not sleeping he still saw so clearly what Asher spoke of and everything Asher said was about God and Lucifer and Michael and Lucifer knew then that Michael's vessel had not come into his hands by accident. From that moment he had no rest and the spark became a slow consuming fire that burned with all of his ancient envy and lust and pride and something that might once have been love until he almost understood what men meant by madness but he knows that he is not mad.  
  
He finds Asher in his old apartments which are now deserted and Asher sits as if he has been waiting for him and Lucifer goes to the window and looks out into the night and finally he says, "It's just like God to put in my hands the one thing I can't have."  
  
Asher is quiet for a long time before he answers.  
  
"Michael's vessel."  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Not having any luck?"  
  
"No. But I will."  
  
He hears the creak of Asher's chair as the old devil leans forward.  
  
"Where do you have him?"  
  
He looks at Asher and is so jealous of this knowledge that he tells him only that Dean is in hell and nothing else and Asher leans back and examines his filthy nails and takes a cigar from his pocket and lights it and huffs on it and the coal waxes and wanes in the gloom.  
  
Then Asher says, "Well, it's a good thing that other one is gone. He'd have been storming the gates by now."  
  
"Who?"  
  
"That angel. Or _was_ an angel."  
  
Lucifer remembers him suddenly and asks what happened to him and Asher waves his hand in a vague fashion that points towards the city outside these walls and at the same time dismisses the subject.  
  
"Dogs got him."  
  
"Are you sure?"  
  
"Has he turned up?"  
  
"No."  
  
"Then he's dead. He'd have to be, because he'd always come when Dean called." Asher looks at him through a veil of gray smoke. "He would always come when Dean called, wouldn't he?"  
  
After a while Lucifer says, "Yes, he would."  
  
"Like there was a chain between the two of them."  
  
"A chain," Lucifer says and thinks of a chain, the chain, the unbroken chain and the sword of adamant and the thousand armies, and of Michael, prince of heaven, archangel of the Lord, vengeance of God and his brother. Once.  
  
He starts as if something has shaken him and Asher leans forward and watches and Lucifer stands there and listens.  
  
"What is it?" Asher says and Lucifer looks at him and a slow smile spreads across his face and then he is gone and Asher, Asmodeus once, sits back in his tattered chair in a cloud of smoke and his own stink as if he would sit there forever until the very walls of the place fell down around him and indeed there is little reason why he would not.  
  
* * *  
  
Mary took Cass up the stairs and they came out together onto the blacktar roof. The starless night sky had turned from black into a yellowed gray with none of dawn's soft approach and no sign of any sun and not even a shred of cloud to mark the blank dome of sky. He had no idea if he faced east or west, north or south. Below him he could see the avenues Mary had led him down in the night and the squalid slums he had come through on his own with their greasy brick walls and maze of streets, some roiling with activity and some deserted or nearly so. In one direction he saw the city taper into that wasteland he had traveled yesterday and in the other he saw only thick clouds of smoke and in yet another he saw a single black spire rising up into the sky.  
  
Mary pointed to the spire. "That's Pandemon," she said. "The old seat of Lucifer's kingdom."  
  
"Do you think Dean is there?"  
  
"Do you really have no idea? Not even a clue?"  
  
"No, I don't."  
  
"Didn't you find him once before?"  
  
"I was sent to rescue Dean before they could break him and open the first seal on Lucifer's prison. I was too late. We were all too late. But I did find him. I didn't need to search for him, I knew where he was. I just knew. Asmodeus thought that would work again." He stared out at the hopeless landscape. "I think he was wrong."  
  
"Why would he even think that would work?" she snapped. "He knows you lost it all."  
  
"He thought it would work because..." Cass looked at her and then looked away. "Because I love Dean."  
  
"Oh. Did he think your dick would be a compass or something?"  
  
"He thought enough of my grace remained that...that our bond would mean something here. But I don't know where Dean is. And you said that you don't either."  
  
"Well why would I?" she laughed. " _I'm_ not fucking him."  
  
"We're wasting time," Cass said.  
  
"Yeah," she said. "You're right." She nodded towards Pandemon. "Might as well start looking there. That's where my father brought me when he found me again."  
  
"Is it guarded?"  
  
"No. No one really wants to get in and there's hardly anyone left to get out. And even if they did, where would they go?" She pointed at the slums. "That shithole?" Towards the smoking horizon. "The mines? The factories?" She looked out in some direction that Cass might have said was south. There seemed to be nothing there at all. "Sheol? Now _that_ place is guarded...but definitely not to keep anyone _out_."  
  
"I know Sheol. I was there, before." He looked at her. "Dean could be there."  
  
"He'll wind up there if Lucifer doesn't get what he wants out of him. But Lucifer rules hell from Pandemon and Dean will be wherever my father is."  
  
"All right," Cass said. "We'll go to Pandemon." He took one more look around and by then Mary had crossed the roof and was waiting for him at the stairs.  
  
"Let's go," she said and so they went.  
  
* * *  
  
Dean called Lucifer for a long time and there was no answer. After a while he became sure that Lucifer was playing some game with him and was going to make him wait until he had to beg.  
  
"You know you want it, asshole," he muttered under his breath. " _Now_ you're playing hard to get?"  
  
Then he heard steps in the hall, the long stride that still sounded so much like Sam's and Lucifer opened the door and closed it and stood there and looked at Dean and neither of them said anything. If Lucifer knew why Dean had called, his face betrayed none of it and the silence spun out between them.  
  
At last Dean said, "You would stop it...what you showed me. What's going on up there."  
  
"Yes I would."  
  
"How? You gonna snap your fingers and put everything back the way it was?"  
  
"It won't be that simple. It's too far gone."  
  
"Then what's the plan? I need to know that this'll work."  
  
"The demons are under my command. I'll bring every one of them back to hell and lock them up down here. The people who are working with them will find out soon enough they picked the wrong side. I'll make sure they wind up here too. Once they're gone, the world will begin to heal."  
  
"What about the Croatoan virus?"  
  
"Gone."  
  
"Gone? Just like that."  
  
"Just like that. Anyone who has it will be cured. There will be no more outbreaks. It'll take a little time to get things back on track, but they'll get there. Years from now, these dark times will just be something they raise memorials to."  
  
"What about you?"  
  
"My business is with heaven and God. If you give me what I want, I'll keep it there. No one on earth will even know what's happening."  
  
"What _will_ be happening?"  
  
"Nothing that will touch your kind. I promise."  
  
"And Sam?"  
  
"Free to go."  
  
"I've seen what people are like after they've been possessed."  
  
"You've seen people possessed by demons and careless, sloppy angels like Raphael. I've taken very good care of your brother, Dean. He can go on to live a full life in a new world. A world that will need leaders like him."  
  
Dean put his head down. His hands were in fists and he shoved them under his arms and began mouthing words to himself and Lucifer said, "What? What are you saying?"  
  
Dean looked up. "I want to talk to him."  
  
Lucifer laughed. _"What?"_  
  
"I want to talk to Sam. Now. Just him. You keep telling me you're still Sam well, you let him come out and talk to me. He'll know if you're telling the truth."  
  
"And that will set your mind at ease?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
Lucifer stood there and contemplated and Dean said, ''Let me talk to him. One last time before I'm...before I'm not myself anymore."  
  
Lucifer smiled. "Oh, Dean. You'll be so much more than yourself. You have no idea."  
  
"Well Sam can tell me about that, too."  
  
"All right," Lucifer said. He nodded. "All right."  
  
"How will I know when he's..." Dean began and then stopped. "Sam?"  
  
"Yeah, Dean. It's me."  
  
"Where's Lucifer?"  
  
"I don't know. He just sort of checks out. " His face shadowed with concern and he said, "Dean..." and came towards him and Dean stepped back and he said, "Dean, it's me. It's really me."  
  
Dean hesitated another moment and then he said, "Sam..." He went to him and pulled him into an embrace. He closed his eyes and held his breath and let himself be there.  
  
"Dean, he's telling the truth. It can all be over."  
  
"Really?" Dean said. He curled open his right hand and looked at the bloody sigil in his palm that he'd made with his own nails and teeth.  
  
"Yeah. And he'll let you go...after. He'll let you go and everything can be like it was before. Better."  
  
"New and improved, huh, Sammy?" He was almost in tears.  
  
"Yeah. New and improved." He drew back to look at Dean and Dean smiled up at him.  
  
"It's good to talk to you, Sam," Dean said.  
  
"You too."  
  
"You know what would be even better?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"If you were really Sam, you lying son of a bitch," he said and then he clamped his bloody hand over Lucifer's forehead and began to say aloud the words he'd been mouthing to himself and Lucifer's eyes flew open and he took a stumbling step backwards and Dean followed without letting him go.  
  
"What are you doing!"  
  
"Something I picked up from an angel," he said and he went on with words Castiel had taught him long ago in a language he'd never heard of.  
  
"Stop this!"  
  
"No," Dean said and then all at once he was thrown to the floor and he raised up and saw Lucifer on his hands and knees with blood dripping from his forehead and neither of them moved and then Lucifer looked up and it was not Lucifer.  
  
"Sam? Sammy?" He scrambled over to him and took Sam's face in his hands and Sam stared at him dazed. "It worked," he said. "It really worked..."  
  
"You shouldn't have done this."  
  
"I had to...Sam..."  
  
"He'll know," Sam said. "He'll know."  
  
"I don't care, Sam, I had to talk to you...I don't know what to do... you said not yet but all those people...the whole world...for God's sake, Sam, what am I supposed to do?"  
  
Sam closed his eyes and shook his head violently  
  
"Not _yet_."  
  
"Did you see those barges? Do you know what's happening? Sam?"  
  
"I know. I know, but you can't say yes, you can't trust him. This is the only thing holding him back and if he gets what he wants he'll finish it, you have to wait, Dean, you _have to wait_..."  
  
"Wait? Wait for what?"  
  
Sam opened his eyes and looked at him.  
  
"Wait for Castiel," he said and Dean pulled back and just stared.  
  
"Cass? Cass is alive? Sam?"  
  
Something shifted in Sam's face. In his eyes. A thing so small it could have gone unnoticed.  
  
"What did he say to you?"  
  
Dean shook his head. He backed away from Lucifer slowly on his knees. As if there was anyplace to go.  
  
" _What_ did he say to you?"  
  
"You wouldn't let him out, you prick."  
  
Lucifer fell on him so suddenly there was no chance of escape and rode him to the ground and grabbed Dean by the jaw and battered his head against the floor until Dean felt his eyes roll up in their sockets.  
  
_"What did he say to you? What?"_  
  
"Nothing..."  
  
"Tell me!"  
  
Dean grinned. "He said you fart in your sleep. Keeps him awake all night."  
  
Lucifer roared wordlessly and slammed Dean's head again and Dean felt the hot wetness of blood begin to spread beneath his skull.  
  
"He said..." His vision swam. "He wishes you'd brush his teeth for once."  
  
"Get up," Lucifer said. He pulled Dean to his feet and Dean's legs stammered beneath him and the room pitched and rolled. "Get the fuck up."  
  
"He said you like to scratch your balls and smell your fingers after," Dean laughed and kept on laughing even as Lucifer was dragging him out the door. He'd never seen what was on the other side. He was in a tunnel, dark, other doors to other cells lining it. A metal grate beneath his bare feet, cold as ice. Lucifer hurled him around and shoved him up against the wall.  
  
"Who the fuck do you think you are?"  
  
"I _know_ who I am. Michael's vessel. Michael's chosen." He smiled. "Not yours."  
  
Lucifer stared at him. The tunnel was deathly silent except for their breathing. Then Lucifer smiled. He lowered Dean to his feet and pulled him away from the wall.  
  
"Come on, Dean. I've got something to show you."  
  
He clamped an arm around Dean and hauled him to a flight of iron stairs and all but dragged him up them and then down a stone passage that narrowed to a keyhole arch and now there was a sound and a stench that called up such immediate and horrifying images that Dean reflexively shrank back and Lucifer laughed and pulled him onwards.  
  
"You're not afraid _now_ are you? Of course you're not!" he said cheerfully and dragged him towards the end of the passage where the light was red and smoking and the noise and stink were worse than ever and Dean retched from all of this and the memories that went with it. He'd been here before.  
  
They came out onto a black gantry with a railing at its edge and Lucifer threw Dean at the railing and bent him over it and seized him by the hair so that he couldn't look away. Below him the pit writhed and burned. This was where they'd first taken him in hell, after a long time alone in the dark, they'd taken him here and left him here in an abyss of time and torment. Dean shut his eyes and put his hands over his face, his ears, and then Lucifer hoisted him up so his feet were in the air and he thought this was it and he had neither time to scream nor pray and then Lucifer was reeling him back. Dean collapsed on the gantry and Lucifer squatted down before him.  
  
"There's still time, Dean. I haven't given up on you yet. Haven't given up on you," he repeated and then pulled him back up to his feet and they went on. Lucifer took him up and down. Through narrow passages lined with doors and behind them Dean could hear screaming and choking and garbled pleas for help and mercy that would never be answered. He'd been here before, too. They came at last to a door that stood alone at a dead end and Lucifer pushed it open and shoved Dean inside so hard that he stumbled and fell. The floor was slick with gore and in the center of it was a drain that was clogged with flesh and hair and bone. He raised up on his hands and looked around himself and it was all so much the same that he almost expected Alistair to be there waiting for him but Alistair was dead and some other demon was here to do Alistair's job. Everything else was unchanged. The walls hanging with tools of the trade. The table with its surface grilled to let the blood sluice through it. Chains and clamps and wires dangling from it. Even the yellow light hanging from the ceiling in its wire cage. All of it the same.  
  
_Playtime's over,_ he thought. _Now we're getting down to business._ He staggered to his feet and turned to face Lucifer and took a step away from him and then another.  
  
"You remember this place, don't you?"  
  
"Oh yeah," Dean said. "Good times."  
  
"I didn't want it to come to this but now I know you only care about your own skin. Not about anyone else. Not even about Sam."  
  
"You don't fucking say his name."  
  
"Tell me what he said to you."  
  
"Go fuck yourself, you piece of shit."  
  
Lucifer stared at him and then he started to laugh. He laughed so hard he had to bend over and put his hands on his knees. Dean looked at him. He looked at the demon who wasn't Alistair, sitting in the corner on a metal stool with a bowl of some grisly slop in his lap and his fingers raised halfway to his mouth. The demon looked at Lucifer and at Dean and back at Lucifer and then Dean turned and grabbed the first thing his hands touched, an iron pipe some four feet in length and dull with dried blood and he spun around and raised it and just as Lucifer looked up Dean slammed it into his head.  
  
The blow sent Lucifer reeling and the demon shot to his feet and the bowl fell and splattered its contents across the floor and Lucifer raised his hand at once and the demon flew up off his feet and crashed into the wall.  
  
"This is between me and him," Lucifer said and then he turned to Dean grinning and straightened up. His ear was bleeding. "Do it again."  
  
Dean stood there panting and he looked at the demon and then at Lucifer with the pipe held out in his two hands as if he were at batting practice.  
  
"Come on, Dean, do it again." He stepped to the right and Dean followed him to the left, circling. "I've been waiting to see some of this fight you're supposed to have. Come on."  
  
"Sam," Dean said. "Sam, talk to me."  
  
Lucifer pulled a long face. "It's me, Dean. It's Sam. Help me, Dean."  
  
"Sam. Talk to me."  
  
"I am talking to you. How could you let this happen to me, Dean? Didn't you promise Dad you wouldn't?"  
  
They circled each other like two figures bound on opposite ends of a pole.  
  
"Sam..."  
  
"Why won't you help me, Dean? Why won't you say yes? Just give him what he wants, Dean, I'm begging you, please, Dean, please..."  
  
Dean stopped for a second and stared at him and then with a hoarse shout he rushed at Lucifer and raised the pipe and swung it hard and Lucifer went down and came up and then stayed down and Dean beat him wildly. He felt something tear in his shoulder and kept going and he was bellowing Sam's name and couldn't stop. Now Lucifer was on his knees and he looked up at Dean with his face battered and all bloody and he raised his arm in supplication.  
  
"Dean...please..." he whispered and Dean caught himself in mid-swing and stared down at him and then his legs were slammed out from underneath him. He went down hard and lost the pipe and heard it clang off across the floor. He lay paralyzed on his back and watched Lucifer get to his feet. Wipe his face. Clean his hand on his shirt. Come to where Dean was sprawled out and stand over him.  
  
"Did that make you feel better?" he said softly. He crouched beside Dean and touched Dean's face and Dean tried to turn his head away but he couldn't. He closed his eyes and waited for whatever came next and then Lucifer grabbed him under the arms and yanked him up against himself into a half-raised position and locked his arms under and over Dean's shoulders and held him there.  
  
"You," Lucifer said. "Come over here."  
  
The demon was still on the floor where Lucifer had thrown him and he got up and slunk over to them.  
  
"Move it," Lucifer said and when the demon was standing next to them he said, "What's your name?"  
  
"I got no name."  
  
"Okay, no-name. Go over there and get that hammer."  
  
The demon went to the wall and took down the broadhead hammer and Lucifer put his mouth to Dean's ear and said, "I need your fucking permission to get in you, but _he_ doesn't. Funny, isn't it? It sucks being an angel sometimes. So many rules."  
  
Dean understood what was about to happen and he started to buck and twist in Lucifer's grasp. He shoved his heels against the floor and tried to push himself away from Lucifer but his feet skidded in the gluey slime and he was held fast.  
  
"You don't want to say yes to me? See what it's like to have _this_ pig upfucking you. See what it's like. You'll be begging for me. I might not even want you after he's done."  
  
"Sam, don't do this," Dean said.  
  
"Sam can't hear you. Sammy's gone for the day."  
  
The demon brought the hammer and held it out to Lucifer but Lucifer said, "Oh no, no-name, that's for you. See, our friend here has some graffiti on his ribs so you'll need to break them before you can get in."  
  
The demon grinned. "You want me to ride him?"  
  
"That's exactly what I want, no-name. Thank you."  
  
Dean closed his eyes. "Sam, I know you can hear me."  
  
The demon squatted down and planted his knees into Dean's thighs to hold him.  
  
"Go on," Lucifer said and the demon raised the hammer and struck. Dean felt two ribs shatter at once and he arched back against Lucifer's chest and gasped and almost fainted.  
  
"Keep going."  
  
Three ribs. Four. Dean grayed out and when he came back he heard Sam's voice, _Wait for Castiel._ It still didn't make sense to him. _Wait for Castiel._  
  
The demon pushed Dean's shirt up and ran a hand over his torso.  
  
"That'll do it," he said to Lucifer. "You want me to keep going?"  
  
"No need for overkill. Just get on with it."  
  
The demon dropped the hammer to the floor and leaned over Dean and seized his head in both hands and then shoved his mouth against Dean's and Dean screamed with that thing's tongue in his mouth and its black soul pouring down his throat and distantly he could feel his brother's heartbeat against his back and hear his own heels hammering the floor.  
  
Then suddenly he was dropped and Lucifer was gone and the demon was gone. He rolled over barely conscious and retched a vile black slurry onto the floor and some of it evaporated like smoke and some of it turned into bugs that ran skittering off down the drain. He lay there with his eyes streaming and saw Lucifer standing with his back to him and at his feet was a pile of black ash and the demon was nowhere. He shuddered and curled up and coughed savagely and then he felt a hand on his arm and he looked up at Sam.  
  
Dean grabbed Sam's wrists and pulled himself up. "Fight him!" he hissed. "Fight him, don't let him back!"  
  
"No, we have to see this through to the end."  
  
"What does that mean?"  
  
"We take him out for good."  
  
"How?"  
  
"Castiel is coming. You have to call him."  
  
"What?"  
  
"You have to call him so he can find you. He has what we need. You can't say yes until then. Do you understand?"  
  
"Yes...no...I don't know... "  
  
"You do. Just call him. He'll come, he always did." He gathered Dean gently into his arms and kissed him on the cheek and buried his face in Dean's shoulder. "It wasn't supposed to get this bad. I thought he would protect you...I thought...." He laid his hand on Dean's broken ribs and Dean felt the pain fade and the bones knit themselves back together.  
  
"That's better."  
  
"Sam," Dean said. "God, Sam, don't go."  
  
"Call him. Pray to him."  
  
Dean nodded and Sam kissed him again and then stood up and was gone.  
  
* * *  
  
They walked out underneath the bridge that Cass had passed the night before and even in that murky daylight the roadbed of the bridge was no more distinct than it had been in the dark. Stone towers rose up into the fog and the sound of wheels on the iron grid was ceaseless but he couldn't imagine whence the bridge came or where it led and when he asked Mary she answered nowhere to both questions. For some time they walked among the city's buildings, all of them black with soot and the gutters beneath their feet were clotted with wet filth. The place seemed as wholly deserted as Detroit had been and the only sounds were their own echoing steps and a wind that moaned in the alleys and empty doorways and broken windows. Finally Cass asked her why there was no one here and she only said that hell went on and on and no one knew the whole of it. Not herself, not Lucifer, not even God.  
  
After a time the buildings became sparser until finally after passing a great pile of smoking rubble they left the city behind. A barren landscape stretched out around them as featureless as a desert of dust and bisected by a single strip of two-lane blacktop. After they'd been walking on this road for a while Cass stopped and looked ahead in dismay.  
  
"Can't you just..."  
  
"Can't I just what?"  
  
"Can't you just take us there all at once?" he asked. "Demons can do that. Angels too."  
  
"I'm neither one," she said.  
  
"You're Lucifer's daughter."  
  
"I have almost no power here at all. The world of men was mine, not this one."  
  
Cass wiped his forehead. The air was not warm but it was heavy and close. His shoulders stooped with fatigue and he couldn't remember when he'd last slept or eaten and the chain had grown immensely heavy. He was still carrying the machinegun that Marcus had given him at The Cairo and he slipped it off and leaned on it and thought that he might as well throw it away for all the good it was here but he couldn't bring himself to get rid of something so valuable, given to him by a good man.  
  
Mary studied him and then she said, "You need to rest. And eat. You should have said something when we were still in the city."  
  
"How long before we get to Pandemon?"  
  
"We won't reach it before dark," she said. "And nothing's left there except Lucifer's old palace."  
  
Cass nodded and then hoisted the machinegun back onto his shoulder and started walking. He was limping on his once-broken foot, the first but far from the last of his human weaknesses. He remembered how Dean had forced him to get out of bed and walk on it so that he wouldn't be crippled and had brought him crutches in some refugee camp or hideout in those first days of the virus which now seemed to have happened in another lifetime altogether.  
  
"There are places," she said from behind him and he stopped and turned around.  
  
"What sort of places?"  
  
"Waystations," she said. "You have them on earth too. I don't think you'll like them very much."  
  
"This is hell. I don't expect to like anything at all."  
  
"All right," she said and as she came up beside him she added, "They come and go but we should find one." She stopped and looked him up and down. "What are you going to do about that chain?"  
  
"Why would I do anything about it?"  
  
"There's a lot of whoring at these waystations. I don't want you taking off your clothes and showing that thing off."  
  
"Is that a requirement?"  
  
"What, fucking?"  
  
"Taking off my clothes. I don't have to strip naked to fuck and I can suck cock fully dressed." She studied him and then she laughed and shook her head and he said, "If you were trying to shock me, don't waste your time, or mine. I know where I am. I know what kind of things I'll have to do."  
  
"Okay then," she said. "Duly noted."  
  
* * *  
  
By the time they reached the waystation night had once again fallen and the place they were headed stood out on that scoured plain like a hot coal pulsing in the dark. Across the distance Cass could hear a saloonlike ruckus of music and harsh voices. It had become very cold and the wind was blowing hard and he was stooped over and shivering, the chain burning him while providing no warmth. Something like snow was falling and now in the light from the waystation he could see frozen and filthy patches of it on the ground among pits that were filled with garbage. The waystation itself was little more than a concrete box that squatted under the black chasm of sky above it. The door of the place opened and a figure came staggering out naked and began to run only to be pursued by others and pulled back inside screaming and he put his hand on Mary's arm and stopped her.  
  
"No. We're not going in there."  
  
"You're going to freeze."  
  
"I'll be all right."  
  
"You don't want to be out here in the dark."  
  
He looked at her and at the waystation and couldn't imagine it would be any safer in there and his own fear and revulsion all but overpowered him. He felt very much at Mary's mercy and thought it was still possible that he might wind up trapped in such a place while Dean remained imprisoned and the world edged ever closer to its end and he didn't know what to do.  
  
At last as if she had made up his mind for him, Mary said, "Wait outside."  
  
He shook his head and she repeated it and led him up to the door and told him again to wait. Before he could stop her she had disappeared inside and the door had closed behind her on a clamor of noise and odors and he was left outside in the wind and the cold. As he stood there he saw shapes creeping in out of the darkness and the waste and gathering in silence all around him. Their eyes shone back the light. He could just make out that some of them were beastlike and others still nearly human in form and he wrapped his hand around the hilt of the knife and put his back to the concrete wall and watched them.  
  
She emerged from the waystation with a tall demon that she called Clay. He wore a waistcoat and britches and he was covered in sores and had a great ring of keys on his wrist. He sized Cass up and then jerked his head and went off around the side of the building.  
  
"Go on," Mary said.  
  
They followed Clay to the back and he took them up stairs that were nothing but rough plankboards nailed together. With a key from his ring he unlocked a door at the top of the stairs and they passed into complete blackness. The noise from downstairs pounded up through the floor. For a moment Cass stood there completely disoriented by the dark and then a sulfur lamp flared up and Cass squinted against the sudden brightness. When his eyes adjusted he saw they were in a long windowless room that was full of trash and broken remnants of furniture. In one corner stood a mountain of discarded clothing.  
  
"This is it," Clay said to Mary.  
  
"It's fine," she answered and then she turned to Cass and said, "You can stay up here. No one has the key except Clay."  
  
"Where are you going?"  
  
"Downstairs."  
  
"No," he said. "No you're not. And I'm not staying locked in up here."  
  
"You don't trust me?"  
  
"Why would I?"  
  
She put her hand on his chest and pushed against the chain and stared at him in the yellow light.  
  
"I need you," she said. "And you need me. You'll be as safe here as you can be anywhere in hell. Get some rest. I'll send you something to eat." She smiled. "Have faith."  
  
Clay said to Mary, "Come on, let's go." Cass seized her wrist.  
  
"What are you going to do down there?"  
  
"It's nothing for me," she said, and then she turned and followed Clay out the door. Cass heard the bolt shut and lock and their footsteps going down the stairs and then there was nothing but the music and shouting and shrieks below his feet.  
  
Cass stood there in the same cornered and helpless panic he'd felt in the basement of The Cairo. Then he began to get undressed. He'd been wearing the chain wrapped securely around his whole torso and now he unwound it and for just a moment he let himself savor the relief of having it off even though he still held it in his hands. Then he wearily wove it around himself again so that it wouldn't show beneath his waist. His hands were shaking while he did it. He thought of Dean in that squalid apartment in The Cairo saying in a dazed and hopeless voice that he knew what happened there and Cass knew what happened here, too. For all his talk of knowing what he'd have to do it wasn't lost on him what a fucking in this place by whatever was downstairs might do to someone who was only human. He was dressed again when the door opened and he turned to face what might come and it was Clay who closed the door and held something out to him.  
  
"Take it. She sent it up for you."  
  
Cass eyed the plate. It looked like plain bread and some kind of stew. It smelled edible. He took the plate and said, "Thank you," and Clay handed him a glass bottle with some liquid sloshing in it and he took that too.  
  
When he turned to go Cass said, "Keep an eye on her."  
  
Clay looked over his shoulder.  
  
"She can take care of herself. You're the one we're keeping an eye on." Then he let himself out and locked the door.  
  
He sat down on the floor and ate and drank a little and then he put the rest of it aside. He leaned his head back against the wall and thought he would never sleep because of the noise downstairs and his own fear but he was exhausted and he closed his eyes and slept.  
  
In his sleep he could hear voices below him shouting and laughing and raised in vulgar song and he could hear the music and the pounding of their feet and fists and now and then shrieks and the ruckus of it thudded up through the floorboards until it merged into a flat wall of sound. He dreamed of the Crowne Plaza in Knoxville Tennessee where corrupt men drank and gambled and fucked and young girls worked the crowd nearly naked and hardly better off than damned souls in hell. The girls in his dream all bore tattoos that announced them open for business and Tanya was among them and Bethany too, her red hair clotted with the blood of her suicide. He turned from the Crowne Plaza and was at once at the freight office in the railyard and he ran up the stairs because Dean was dying and Anna had given him the power to do save him because God did not make mistakes.  
  
In his dream the stairs changed and they were not crumbling and dirty but softly carpeted. He was no longer in the freight office but in a quiet and empty house that had somehow not been ransacked. Upstairs was a dripping sound and a spot in the ceiling from which long plaster stalactites hung and the carpet beneath it was wet and at the end of the hall was a bedroom, pale gray and cool with lace curtains over the windows and Dean was asleep in the bed under a clean white bedspread.  
  
He stood in the doorway and felt all at once the full weight of Lucifer's chain and the scorching burn of it on him and he knew that this was more than a dream. Yet still he could only stand there and watch Dean sleep. At last he laid his gun down on the floor and took off his wet and filthy coat and his boots as well and he came into the room and turned back the white covers and eased himself into the bed behind Dean. He listened to the soft sounds of rain and wind against the house and then he put his arm around Dean and laid his cheek against Dean's shoulder and closed his eyes. _Just for this moment,_ he thought. He lay in the warm bed and held him close. _That's all._  
  
After a while Dean stirred and took a deep breath and as if in his sleep he said, "You're right, Cass. We won't go to Detroit. There's nothing there."  
  
Cass drew Dean even more closely to himself and said nothing and Dean repeated, "There's nothing there," and then at last Cass said Dean's name and Dean went very still, listening.  
  
"Dean," Cass said again.  
  
Dean turned over and looked up at Cass and Cass saw again those eyes as he'd first seen them in hell. The beginning of his long fall that had brought him at last to the very ending of the world. Dean stared at him.  
  
"Is this a dream or real?" Dean whispered.  
  
"Both."  
  
"I thought you were dead. Are you?"  
  
"No, I'm trying to find you."  
  
"I called you...prayed to you. Sam told me to."  
  
"Sam?" Cass said and Dean nodded and closed his eyes and leaned himself into Cass and Cass wrapped his arms around him and held onto him.  
  
"You're alive." Dean said. "You're _alive._ "  
  
Cass could think of nothing except Dean in his arms. He could not have let go of him for any reason on his own but something changed and Cass felt himself holding onto nothing but flesh and bones and there was an odor of blood and sickness and filth. Dean pulled away from him and Cass saw him skeletal and bloody and knew that he was seeing Dean as he really was now.  
  
"Oh my God...Dean..."  
  
Dean shook his head and pushed him away and rolled over and threw back the bedspread and when it landed there was a bloody handprint on it and he was sitting on the edge of the bed and the white sheets were smeared all crimson around him. Cass sat up and put a hand on Dean's back and Dean bent over his knees.  
  
"It's too late. He wins. I either give him what he wants and everyone dies or I let him kill me and everyone dies. Either way it all ends the same."  
  
"What does he want..." Cass began and then remembered what Mary had told him. "Michael," he said. "He wants you to be his vessel because you would have been Michael's."  
  
Dean nodded. "That's the only way to get him out of Sam but then..." He turned around and stared at Cass. "Sam said you have what we need. You have the chain?"  
  
"Yes," Cass said. He nodded fiercely. "Yes, look..." He unbuttoned his shirt and revealed it and Dean stared at it and touched it with just his fingertips as Mary had done and then looked at Cass. "How are we ever gonna get this on him?"  
  
"I don't know, but we will. I have help. And you have...you said Sam talks to you?"  
  
"Yeah, but the motherfucker's catching on. He's not gonna wait much longer for me to say yes and if I don't...Cass, I'm going back in the Pit."  
  
"Is that where you are?"  
  
Dean put his head down and grimaced. "Yeah. Or close to it." He looked up at Cass. "I'm where you found me the last time. Where Alistair had me."  
  
"Where Alistair had you..." Cass said and then, "You're not in Pandemon. We're going the wrong way." He took Dean's face in his hands. "Dean, you have to hold on. You can't say yes until you know I'm there."  
  
"How will I know that?"  
  
"You'll see me. I'm coming for you."  
  
Dean stared at him and then he closed his eyes and took Cass's hands and bent his head. His hair was all bloody, the back of his head crusted with it.  
  
"I promised you we'd go into this together and I lied." He looked up at Cass. "I had to."  
  
"I lied too. I'm not going to let Lucifer have you, or kill you. I don't care what happens to me. I never have."  
  
Dean smiled. He almost laughed.  
  
"In all thy ways. You weren't kidding, were you?"  
  
"No," Cass said. He kissed Dean. "Not once."  
  
Suddenly Cass woke up alone against the wall in the upper room at the waystation. He sat up and looked around himself hardly knowing where he was. The place was completely silent. He could hear his own pulse in his ears. He could still feel Dean in his arms.  
  
He picked up his gun beside him and stood up in the dark and felt his way to the door and listened. There wasn't a sound. He put his hand on the doorknob and although he had heard Clay lock the door the knob turned and the door opened and he stepped out onto the plankboard stairs. Above him the black roof of sky. All around him the desert waste and the wind blowing. He went down the stairs and around to the front of the waystation and listened there for a moment and heard nothing and then let himself in. His eyes cut across the room and he saw Mary and Clay at a table, playing cards. There was not another soul in the place. Clay threw his cards on the table and stood up so suddenly his chair fell over backwards.  
  
"You cunt," he said and he turned and stalked off. The tail of his waistcoast flapped around his britches. He gave Cass a filthy look and said, "You better be glad she's so good. We were playing for your ass."  
  
She was shuffling the cards and she looked up at him.  
  
"Sleep tight?"  
  
"What did he mean?"  
  
"What do you think he meant?"  
  
"I thought you he was on your side."  
  
"Demons are on their own side. That asshole wanted to raffle you off and I said anyone who wanted you would have to play me first."  
  
Cass stared at her. He swallowed. He cleared his throat. She smiled.  
  
"Now who's shocked?"  
  
"Thank you...I...thank you." He looked around. "Where did they all go?"  
  
She shrugged. "Sore losers," she said and then she stopped shuffling and narrowed her eyes at him. "What's happened to you?"  
  
"I know where Dean is and it's not Pandemon. He's in Sheol."  
  
"How do you know that?"  
  
"I had a vision."  
  
"A vision or a dream?"  
  
"Both."  
  
"Well," she said. "I guess old Asmodeus knew what he was doing." She set the cards down on the table. "This isn't such good news."  
  
"Doesn't matter. We have to get there."  
  
"I guess we do."  
  
She stood up and straightened her coat. Her stomach was bigger as if whatever she carried had doubled its size in this one night. She combed her fingers through her hair and then she finished her drink and walked past him and out the door and when Cass turned to follow her Clay was at his side.  
  
"I'd watch her if I were you," he hissed. "She always was daddy's girl."  
  
"Meaning what?"  
  
Clay grinned. His teeth were gray and crumbling. He rubbed his gut.  
  
"Ask her what she's got cooking in there. It may not be what you think."  
  
She was standing in the open door with smoky daylight spilling in around her and she told Cass to come on and Cass looked back at Clay but Clay only cocked an eyebrow at him and hitched up his rotting britches and turned away.  
  
* * *

Dean woke in a horror of thirst. His old cell had at least had running water, foul smelling and tasting though it was, and this chamber had nothing like it. The drain in the floor was for the blood of the damned and no water had ever touched this room. He was still concussed and whatever he'd ruptured in his shoulder while beating Lucifer was a constant throbbing pain and there was a wound in that shoulder that he'd had since the Palisades and it was sore and festering but above all this was thirst. Like the presence of some new demon worse than all the rest who never left his side. He would have drunk his own piss if he had any. He looked at the sharp tools on the wall and imagined cutting himself open and drinking his blood but the thought of it in his mouth hot and thick and salty made the thirst worse. He remembered some true story of the old west where prospectors lost in the desert had survived by sucking out the eyeballs of their horses and dying companions and now he could understand though his own eyes felt so shriveled that he doubted there was more than a drop of jelly in them. He thought of the tap in his old cell and its steady drip of yellow water and he could see the drops shimmering at the edge of the faucet and hear them sliding cool and wet down some unseen culvert and he shuddered with want.  
  
Meanwhile all around him was the room where Alistair had tortured him and broken him. He was sure it was the same one or maybe there were many of them in hell and they all looked like this. It hardly mattered. In this place or one just like it he'd finally given up and opened the first seal without even knowing it and in a place like this he would finally have to try and end it, unless Cass came as he said he would. But for now Dean couldn't even think about that. There was only thirst and the dream of Cass had been days ago and even that had begun to fade.  
  
The place was infested and there were insects on the floor and the walls and on him. He stood up brushed them off but he was so unsteady that he collapsed to his knees trembling and he bent his head to at least shake them out of his hair. He was in an appalling state of filth, his own and the gruesome slops he'd been lying in, and his clothes were stiff and stuck to him and he would have torn them off but couldn't stand the thought of sitting there naked among the bugs and the stink and the rotting gristle of this room's former guests. In this sorry state Lucifer at last found him and by then he was closer to death than life.  
  
Lucifer took him under the arms and gently raised him to sitting and Dean felt as if he might crack into pieces. He made a dry and broken noise in his throat and Lucifer shushed him like a child. He felt something cool and smooth placed in his hands.  
  
"Drink it," Lucifer said, and he held Dean's hands and raised them up. Dean took one long drink out of the glass and for a moment he just sat in amazement and let the water soak his tongue. Then he swallowed it and suddenly the thirst roared up into something beyond all reason and he clutched the glass and chugged the water and distantly he heard Lucifer telling him to slow down but he couldn't and then he doubled over and vomited, the water coming up just as clear and cool as it had gone down and the glass shattering on the floor.  
  
"No matter," Lucifer said.  
  
Dean lay on his side and looked up at Lucifer and Lucifer smiled and wiped Dean's mouth and then helped him sit up again and put a fresh glass of water in his hands.  
  
"Slowly this time," he said and Dean nodded and lifted the glass and drank in small sips, letting each one trickle down his dry throat and into his gut and making sure it would stay down before he took another.  
  
"That's it," Lucifer said. "That's it."  
  
When he was done Dean sat against the wall with his eyes closed and the empty glass tilting in his lap and he slipped into a soft doze that was almost sleep. When he opened his eyes he saw Lucifer beside him but he also saw Sam. This Lucifer or Sam took the glass from Dean's hands and set it down on the floor and then reached up and cupped Dean's face in one warm hand and Dean stared at him.  
  
At last he whispered, "Who are you?"  
  
Lucifer or Sam smiled.  
  
"I am your brother," he said and then he leaned forward and kissed Dean on the mouth. He drew back and looked at Dean and kissed him again and Dean thought, _Whose brother? Whose?_  
  
When he broke the kiss there was blood on Lucifer's mouth because Dean's own lips were cracked and bleeding and Lucifer shook his head and smiled again, tenderly. He moved his hand and stroked his thumb over Dean's forehead and told him to go to sleep and no sooner had he said it than Dean obeyed.  
  
He woke next to a sensation that had become so foreign he at first didn't know what it was. Then he realized it was comfort. He was not in pain or thirsty, he felt clean linens against him and felt himself clean as well. He was lying on his side with a pillow under his head and a warm blanket over him and these things had a laundry freshness to them that was so long forgotten he could only lie there with his eyes closed and breathe it in.  
  
When he opened his eyes he thought he would see Lucifer but he didn't. He sat up slowly and cautiously and the blanket and sheet fell away into his lap. He felt the back of his head and the dried blood that had been there was gone. He touched his face and realized he was clean-shaven and he looked down at himself and saw that he was dressed in new white underclothes and the bed linens were also white and the room around him was crisply neat and bland as one in any interstate motel chain. Next to the bed was a pale wooden nightstand bearing a lamp and pitcher of water and a glass, already half full. In the corner, a small round table and two chairs and a shaded lamp on a brass chain above them. The walls were papered in beige stripes and above the bed was a framed picture of a pleasant street in some quiet country town. There was no window and only one door, white with a brass handle.  
  
He sat up and swung his legs over the bed and put his bare feet down on the light blue carpet. He looked at the nightstand and picked up the glass and drank. The water was room-temperature and slightly sweet, as if there might be something in it. He'd tasted water like this in the hospital years ago when hospitals had still existed, and the torment of his recent thirst came back to him and he drained the glass and poured himself another and drank that too. Then he put the glass down. He opened the nightstand's drawer and was somehow unsurprised to find a pocketsized Gideon's Bible with Psalms and Proverbs. He picked it up and opened its false leather cover and looked at the name and the Nashville copyright address and then he closed it and put it back in the drawer and closed that too and stood up. He wavered but stayed on his feet. He crossed the room and opened the one door onto a small bathroom, also as clean and nondescript as a motel's. He turned on the light. He lifted the toilet and looked into it and saw only a toilet. He twisted the taps and clear water ran out of them and he shut them off. He studied himself pale and bony in the mirror over the sink. He turned on the shower and stood there mesmerized by the spray splashing down on his hand and then he turned off the shower and dried his hand on one of the white towels and when he walked out of the bathroom Lucifer was sitting at the foot of the bed.  
  
"I thought you'd want some clothes," he said. He held a small stack of neatly folded garments out to Dean. Dean just stared at him.  
  
"Why don't you sit down?" Lucifer said and he gestured to the table and Dean looked at it and now there was a meal there waiting for him. Breakfast. Bacon and eggs. Hashbrowns and toast. Coffee.  
  
"Sit," Lucifer said. "Go ahead and eat."  
  
"I know why I'm here," Dean said.  
  
"Do you?"  
  
"It's like you said about the rest of the world. It's too far gone, you can't just snap your fingers and fix it? I was too far gone, wasn't I?"  
  
Lucifer set the clothes down on the bed next to him and put his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands and looked at Dean.  
  
"You were nearly dead when I found you."  
  
"When you found me?" Dean said. "You _put_ me down there."  
  
"You were nearly dead when I found you," Lucifer repeated. "You were almost past healing. You can't be my vessel in that condition, you would just shatter. And then where would I be?"  
  
"So what, you park me in Motel 666 until I get some meat on my bones?"  
  
"Something like that."  
  
"What if I don't play along? Back to the dungeon?"  
  
"If you don't play along I tie you to the bed and shove a funnel down your throat." He stood up and pointed to the table. "I think you'll prefer the food in solid form, but it's up to you." He turned away and then he turned back to Dean and said, "Sam isn't coming back, by the way. I've taken care of that."  
  
"Taken care of it."  
  
Lucifer nodded. "I know he told you something. I don't care what it was. It won't change anything. You have only two choices."  
  
After a moment, Dean said, "I know it," and then he was alone.  
  
He went to the table and looked at the food. He _was_ hungry. Starving. Yet he didn't want to eat and he wished that he hadn't even drunk the water or allowed himself to be fascinated by the bathroom. He felt like a piece of livestock being fattened up for slaughter and he had a sudden impulse to dump all of the food on the floor and smash it and tear up the room besides and at least show Lucifer that he wasn't going to go down fighting but he didn't do any of that. Instead he turned around and looked at the picture over the bed. It was an ordinary house on a plain street in Anytown U.S.A. He stepped closer and studied it. It was his family's house on Indiana Street in Lawrence Kansas.  
  
"Nice touch, you asshole," he said, but he stood there and kept looking at it. He thought about Sam and he thought about his father also. His father who had raised his sons up to hunt things that went bump in the night and who had probably never himself imagined what they would all come to in the end. His mind called up a sudden and ancient memory, one that was so common that it shouldn't have stood out more than any other and yet it did. He'd been about twenty and Sam sixteen and the two of them had botched some simple job that their father had let them work alone. Afterwards he had told Sam that while he didn't expect Dean to do more than go in there swinging he relied on Sam to _think._  
  
He heard, _Think,_ but now it was Sam's voice, not his father's. _Dean, think._  
  
_You can't be my vessel in that condition,_ Lucifer had said. _You would just shatter. And then where would I be?_  
  
Dean thought about this. He hadn't considered what would happen if Lucifer left Sam without a new vessel at hand and now he thought, _You'd be out in the open, wouldn't you, you son of a bitch? Exactly where I want you._ Against his fingers he could feel the chain Cass had worn in his dream. He could _see_ it. Cass was alive and was coming for him, bearing Lucifer's chain.  
  
He looked at the food on the table. His mouth immediately watered and just as instantly he was afraid to eat. _He put something in it._ he thought. _That's what he's going to do, drug me up so that I'll be so out of it I'll say yes without even knowing it,_ and he looked at the water by the bed and wanted to go in that bathroom and make himself puke it up and then he knew he wasn't making sense. He was here not just because Lucifer needed him well but because Lucifer needed him to acquiesce of his own free will. Only a man sound in body and mind has free will because only a man sound in body and mind can think and Dean realized it had been a very long time since he'd been in any condition to think at all.  
  
He sat down at the table and ate. It was all delicious. He'd never had such a breakfast. He got up and went into the bathroom. He took a leisurely piss and flushed it and then although he didn't feel like he needed one he took a shower. He couldn't even remember when he'd last had the luxury of a hot shower. Possibly years ago. Before the virus and the refugee camps and all the cold nights spent in cars beneath overpasses and abandoned houses and moldering cabins. He got out and dried off. He wiped the steam off the mirror and checked himself out and aside from the old print of Castiel's hand on his shoulder there wasn't a mark on him. When he went back into the bedroom the breakfast dishes were gone from the table.  
  
"Classy," he said out loud, and he actually laughed. He put on the clothes that Lucifer had left on the bed. Then he made the bed although he couldn't recall ever having made a bed by choice in his entire life. He looked at the picture on the wall. He thought about Cass, telling him to hold on. He thought of his father. He'd been going in swinging for so long but that was all behind him now. He sat down to think.  
  
* * *  
  
Mary took Cass back into the city by a different way through streets that steamed and hissed where ratlike devils stared at them out of doors and windows that were little more than holes in hovels. It was still day but the sky had grown dark as if a great brown fog had rolled in and here and there a gaslamp burned a sullen and oppressed flame but there was no other light. The walls were dripping with the damp.  
  
They came at last to a vast railyard. In the center stood a roundhouse with a tangle of iron rails feeding into it and on the rails sat caged boxcars that were packed with souls. There was only one track leading out of the roundhouse and this pointed south. Mary wove her way among the teeming boxcars and the souls pleaded and wept and cursed and snatched at both of them. She ignored them but Cass looked up once and saw their faces against the bars and their arms outstretched in supplication and he thought that in such a multitude all could hardly deserve this fate. Dean had been here and he had not deserved it.  
  
"Please," someone said near his knees and he looked down and saw a woman crushed at the bottom of the boxcar. Her hand was out between the bars and her fingers clutched at the air. "This is a mistake. Some kind of horrible mistake." Others took up the cry and now Cass turned in a circle and looked upon the innumerable horde of them and they were all begging him to listen and Cass wondered what God knew of this. What the other angels knew.  
  
"Cass!"  
  
"You can't do anything for them," she said and he knew that she was right. He set his eyes on the ground and followed her and the cries and curses of the damned rose up in futility all around him.  
  
* * *  
  
Dean ate twice more that day and then he went to bed and fell at once into a dreamless sleep. When he opened his eyes Lucifer was sitting in a chair at the side of the bed reading the Bible.  
  
"Shouldn't that make you burst into flames or something?"  
  
Lucifer smiled.  
  
"Most of what's in here is bullshit, you know. Nasty fairy tales. My side's gotten more mileage out of it than God's most of the time." He threw it on the bed. "None of the good stuff is in there."  
  
"Like what?"  
  
"Like the truth about God. And angels and man. What happened between me and Michael."  
  
"What did happen?"  
  
"I asked him to stand with me and he wouldn't. I would have made him a king in his own right and he chose to sit at God's feet and take orders like a trained monkey. He knew he was God's favorite. What was the love of a brother compared to that?"  
  
Dean sat up in the bed and watched Lucifer. Lucifer was staring out at some point on the wall where a window might have been. Then he looked at Dean and came up out of the chair and kissed him. He put his hand behind Dean's head and held him there until Dean opened his mouth for him. He could have bitten Lucifer's tongue in half but he didn't. Lucifer broke the kiss and told him to lie down.  
  
"What if I don't?"  
  
"You know I can make you."  
  
"Then do that. Put a little effort into it."  
  
He thought Lucifer was going to knock him out but instead he pushed Dean down on the bed and turned him over and fixed him there so that Dean couldn't even twitch. He had to lie still and listen to Lucifer undress.  
  
"This isn't even what you want," Dean said calmly.  
  
"I know," Lucifer said. He stripped Dean naked below the waist and lay on top of him. "But you haven't given me what I want."  
  
Lucifer shoved into him and Dean closed his eyes. He could do that at least. He rode it out and when Lucifer was done he rolled off of Dean and lay down next to him, flushed and sweating. After a while he said, "In time, our intercourse will be much deeper."  
  
"That felt pretty fuckin deep to me," Dean said. He could move now and pushed himself away but Lucifer raised up on one elbow and caught Dean's wrist.  
  
"You'll see," he said. He sat up and with his other hand he got the Bible and flipped through it. Dean watched him and contemplated how fucking crazy he was. He wondered if he'd always been this crazy or if all those years down in the hole had done this to him. Probably the first one.  
  
"Here," Lucifer said. He handed the book to Dean. "Read that."  
  
Dean looked where he was pointing and took the book and Lucifer told him to read it out loud.  
  
"For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face."  
  
"You understand?"  
  
"Not really."  
  
"You will," Lucifer said. He leaned forward and kissed him again. Dean held his breath and rolled up his eyes and stared at the ceiling. When Lucifer was gone Dean went into the bathroom and took a hot and very long shower. Then he got dressed and sat on the bed. The Bible was open facedown on the bed and he picked it up and read that passage again and then once more and then he dogeared the page and sat there with the book in his lap. He thought about things seen through a glass, darkly. About things seen face to face. About Satan, out in the open, where Dean wanted him. But not yet.  
  
* * *  
  
Inside the roundhouse a black locomotive was being turned amidst a great iron screeching and a shower of sparks. Mary went up to a demon who stood there smoking and she spoke to him as if they knew each other and when she came back to Cass she said that they would ride in the locomotive.  
  
He stood there and looked at her and then he said, "Do all of these demons know who you are?"  
  
"Some of them."  
  
"And you just walk among them?"  
  
"What are they going to do to me?"  
  
"Tell Lucifer what you're doing."  
  
"What would they tell him?"  
  
"That you're going to Sheol and you have someone with you."  
  
"Lucifer's been in a hole for more years than most of these demons have been around. They hardly even believe he exists. As for me, most of them only know that I'm not a human soul and I'm not a demon like them."  
  
"Clay knew who you were."  
  
"Clay and I go a ways back." She raised an eyebrow. "Did he say something to you?"  
  
Cass studied her and then looked at her pregnant belly and said, "This is Lucifer's?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"When did he get this on you?"  
  
"When he was set free."  
  
"That was a long time ago."  
  
"I've been brooding on it."  
  
"And it's no concern of his?"  
  
"He doesn't know about it."  
  
In the smoky darkness of the roundhouse he could just make out her white face. The great squeal of the turntable went on and the demons bellowed and cursed at their work.  
  
"Death was the last son you gave him."  
  
"Yes it was."  
  
"What will this one be?"  
  
"I told you."  
  
"Tell me again."  
  
"It will be Vengeance. Mine."  
  
"The angels believed that if Lucifer wasn't stopped he would bring forth a terrible beast to devour the world at the end of days."  
  
They were hitching the boxcars to the locomotive. She looked at them and said, "Do you think Lucifer needs any beast to finish off the world?" She leaned towards him. "Without me you'll never get near Lucifer. Or Dean. You know that right?"  
  
After a moment he nodded.  
  
"Then stop fucking around," she said. She turned her back on him and made for the train, now steaming on its track, its ovens glowing red, its doomed freight writhing in despair.  
  
* * *  
  
The next time Lucifer came to him, he didn't have to put any spell on Dean to hold him still and Dean didn't fight him. Afterwards Lucifer turned him over and put his hand between Dean's legs.  
  
"You didn't like it."  
  
"Am I supposed to?"  
  
"It'll be better if you stop resisting."  
  
"I didn't resist."  
  
"No, but..." He propped himself up on his elbow and wrapped his hand around Dean's cock and went to work on him. "Do you want me to stop?"  
  
"Would you care if I did?"  
  
Lucifer smiled and stroked him and bent down to whisper, "It feels like you don't."  
  
Dean closed his eyes and tried to make his mind go to other things but Lucifer was deft and in a little time Dean came. He moaned in spite of himself and when he opened his eyes Lucifer was still smiling. He laid his wet hand on Dean's chest.  
  
"That's better, isn't it?"  
  
Dean looked up at him and Lucifer smiled and swirled his fingers in the come on Dean's stomach and then Dean said, "Tell me about Michael," and Lucifer went still.  
  
"Tell you what?"  
  
"I was supposed to be the guy's vessel and I don't know a goddamn thing about him. Except that you hate him. Or love him. Or were fucking him, I don't even know. What did he do to you anyway?"  
  
"I told you."  
  
"No you didn't."  
  
Lucifer didn't say anything and it was very quiet. As if only this room existed and nothing else outside it. For all Dean knew, that was the case. He raised up suddenly and kissed Lucifer on his own. He reached down and took Lucifer in hand and stroked him. When he broke the kiss he said, "It'll be better if I know."  
  
Lucifer grinned and pushed Dean down on his back and bent up his legs and fucked him and when he was done he lay down beside him and started to talk.  
  
* * *  
The train bore down through hell's night. The track before it burned molten in the locomotive's single headlamp and twisted creatures leapt out of its way or were crushed beneath its wheels and all around them was darkness and the locomotive was murderously hot and reeked of coal and sulfur. Two demons shoveled fuel into the stove and both of them wore iron collars around their necks that were chained to ringbolts in the floor. Cass huddled on the floor beside the coalbox and Mary sat up by the engineer and after a while she came back to where Cass was and told him that they would have to work or the engineer would put them off the train. So Cass lay down his machinegun and took off his coat and shoveled as they told him to do and when he paused once to wipe his streaming face he looked to the front of the locomotive and in the red haze and dust of the coalfire he saw Mary stark naked on her hands and knees with her distended breasts and belly swinging low beneath her and the engineer's claws around her hips as he fucked her and her hair hung in her sweaty face and she was grinning like a jackal and in the darkness behind them all the damned howled into the night, bound for the place of no return.  
  
* * *  
  
Dean's mind would wander. He'd let his eyes roll closed and drift out of himself and walk through his past life. He was teaching Sam to tie his shoes. Flirting with a waitress in a diner. Hustling some poor bastard out of his pool money. He was driving down a strip of empty road with the window wide open and the radio on and the summer sun baking his arm. He was lying in bed with Cass asleep next to him and the rain was falling on the roof and the curtain lifted into the room on soft autumn wind that smelled of woodsmoke and wet leaves.  
  
He reined himself in and opened his eyes and looked up at Lucifer.  
  
"I want to see you."  
  
Lucifer went on with his business between Dean's legs.  
  
"You see me."  
  
"The real you. You told me everything about Michael, now I need to know you."  
  
"You know me." He thrust hard and grinned, his hair in his eyes. "We know each other very well now, don't we?"  
  
"I want to see you," Dean said. He closed his eyes and caught his breath and then opened his eyes and said, "Face to face. The way Michael did," and Lucifer paused and stared down at him.  
  
"No man has seen me."  
  
"I'm not just any man. I'm Michael's chosen. Your chosen."  
  
"Are you saying yes?"  
  
Dean was shaking. He wanted to put his legs down but he couldn't and his arms were pinned up over his head.  
  
"Are you saying yes?"  
  
Dean shook his head.  
  
"Not yet."  
  
Quietly, Lucifer said, "Does it serve you to play these games?"  
  
_Oh, it serves me,_ Dean thought. _You better believe it serves me, you fucker._  
  
Lucifer stared at him for another moment and then pulled out and threw him over facedown and fell on him and thrust back into him. When he came he bit Dean in the same shoulder where the other wound had been and Dean wrung the sheet in his fists and tried to stay quiet but at last it was so painful that he cried out until he was nearly sobbing. He could feel Lucifer grinning as he sucked blood out of him and spewed come into him and when he was finally spent he lay on top of Dean and slowly licked at the wound. Slowly ground his hips against him. Then he sighed and rolled off and got up from the bed.  
  
"Look at me," he said and when Dean didn't move he grabbed Dean's arm and turned him over roughly. "You see me."  
  
He was standing there naked and sweaty with his cock wet and still hard. His mouth and chin were bloody.  
  
"I see my brother. I see you hiding in him. I want to see _you..._ " He looked Lucifer up and down and now saw something he had missed or misunderstood. He was bleeding. From his right side, at his waist. It was not Dean's blood on him but his own. Oozing out of him. He looked up at Lucifer's face. "Where did Michael get you?"  
  
"What?"  
  
Dean raised up on his elbows and stared at Lucifer.  
  
"In the right side, wasn't it?" He smiled. "That's what you told me. Skewered you like a pig with that...what did you call it? Sword of adamant? That was it, right?"  
  
"Why are you asking me this?" Lucifer asked and then Dean looked down and Lucifer followed his gaze and saw. He stood there and stared. He raised his hand and touched the open wound and two of his fingertips sank into it and a rill of blood spilled out and ran over his bare hip. He looked at Dean.  
  
"What did you do?"  
  
"I didn't do shit. What did _you_ do?"  
  
_"What did you do?_ Lucifer roared and he lunged at Dean and Dean scrabbled backwards and threw himself off the bed and Lucifer went after him and then suddenly Lucifer was gone and Dean was alone on the floor. He turned over and crouched there listening. Then he stood up. The room was quiet. The bedsheets were slick with semen and blood. There was blood on the carpet where Lucifer had been standing. Lucifer himself was nowhere.  
  
* * *  
  
Cass lay exhausted and the train lurched relentlessly under him. His hands were blistered and bleeding. The chain felt as if it were itself made of burning coals. Mary brought him something to drink.  
  
"How much further?" he asked her. The only light was from the fire and she was lit up all red.  
  
"A ways," she said. "It's very far."  
  
"Will we get there in time?"  
  
"We'll get there."  
  
He closed his eyes. He heard her go. He fell into a stupor and then slept and in his sleep he dreamt of Dean and in the dream Dean said that soon they would see face to face and he was all bloody and Cass reached out to him but Dean stepped away and Cass couldn't see him anymore. Then suddenly Anna was with him and she told him the time was growing short, so short and then he woke up.  
  
* * *  
  
Dean sat on the edge of the bed. He would not sleep in it again. He thought he probably wouldn't sleep ever again, anywhere. He'd bandaged his shoulder with a strip of sheet but he could feel it still bleeding under his shirt. The Bible was on the nightstand and he leaned over and picked it up and began to page through it and then to flip through it as if he were searching for something and then he closed it and stared at it in his hands. He went to put it back on the nightstand but instead he stood up and put it in his back pocket and then he sat down to wait for Lucifer.  
  
He thought about his life and it seemed like something that had happened to someone else. Someone not even real. As if he'd seen it on television. A few moments stood out clearer than others but even these he now felt greatly distanced from and at last he found himself just thinking about rain. Driving at night in the rain. There were places in the country where the rain would suddenly come down hard all at once and go on for hours and he'd loved to drive on those sorts of nights with the rain like a veil all around the car and the radio turned down low and the windshield wipers keeping the beat. Headlights on wet blacktop and the road lit up red behind him. Best on those lonely flat stretches of highway where he'd have the road to himself, like in the Dakotas or Wyoming or Texas. The endless expanse of Texas. He'd done a lot of driving in Texas and a lot of it on such rainy nights and now the rest of his life seemed to be fading away but he remembered this. How it would rain at night, in Texas.  
  
* * *  
  
The train stopped. Cass picked himself up. He could barely stand. He lifted the machinegun and put it on his shoulder and looked about himself. Mary was at his side and she took his arm.  
  
"This way," she said.  
  
He followed her down from the locomotive. It was not day and he knew there would be no day here. The ground beneath him was flinty and they were on an open plain and there was a burning stench on the air and the souls had been released from the boxcars and were trying to run in that fuming darkness and monstrous demons were herding them as if for sport.  
  
"This way," she repeated and she led him away from the train and that awful scene and took him around a great brick wall that seemed only the uppermost of some structure all but buried underground and four brick smokestacks loomed above them. Her belly was huge and straining at her coat and she was panting and some fetid ichor was running thick and black down the insides of her legs. She squatted down beside the wall and began to dig with her hands and Cass got down beside her and dug as well.  
  
"You're sick," he said.  
  
"Dig," she said. She didn't look at him. "Just dig."  
  
They dug until they uncovered a wooden door with an iron ring in it and it was not bolted and together they pulled it open and climbed inside and pulled it shut behind them. It was so dark.  
  
"Come," she said and she grabbed Cass's hand.  
  
"Where are we going?"  
  
"To the Pit," she said. "Lucifer is there."  
  
"You know this?" he asked. He stumbled blindly behind her. "You're sure?"  
  
She stopped and in the darkness she put his hand on her stomach and he could feel beneath the taut flesh a violent squirming as if she were full of snakes.  
  
"My time is almost come," she said. "My son knows his father." Then she went on.  
  
* * *  
  
Lucifer appeared as he always did with no warning and the two of them stared at each other and neither said a word. He was dressed the way Sam might have dressed when he was just Sam but the shirt he wore was bloody from his right armpit to his hip.  
  
At last Lucifer said, "You did this to me."  
  
Dean looked at him with his heart hammering so hard he was sure Lucifer could see him shaking and for a moment he almost said nothing but then he said, "Yes I did."  
  
"How? You said no to him."  
  
"It doesn't matter. I was his chosen. You said so yourself."  
  
"Get up," Lucifer said, and so Dean did.  
  
* * *  
  
He followed her in pure darkness with one hand in hers and the other feeling against the wall. There was a terrible sound growing ahead of them and a stench and he knew they were coming to the Pit and then suddenly her hand slipped out of his.  
  
"Mary?" he said. He groped for her in the dark. _"Mary?"_  
  
He went forward with his hands on the wall calling out to her. He came up against some pile of debris and he began to clamber over it but it was mountainous and he couldn't see and he slipped and fell end over end to the ground scrabbling for purchase and he lost the machinegun and heard it thump to the ground somewhere and in a panic he went to his hands and knees to feel for it but it didn't seem to be anywhere and then her voice was in his ear.  
  
"You go on alone from here."  
  
"No!" he shouted. He felt her pull the knife from his belt but when he grabbed for her no one was there. "No!"  
  
He crouched there with his eyes wide and sightless and knew she was gone and for a moment he was frozen in place. Then he turned and began to climb again over what was in his way.  
  
"God help me," he whispered. "Anna, if you can hear me, help me, oh God, someone help me."  
  
He made it to the other side of the pile and pushed forward and now there was some light. He saw something ahead like a crack in the wall and smoky light leaked through it and the walls around him shook from the screams and laughter and howls of the damned in the Pit. He stumbled and fell and the chain was so heavy that he couldn't get up and heavier still was the awful affliction of his own humanity. Earned through love. Through grace. Once lost and then found again, in a fallen world.  
  
_You think you were punished for this love._ Anna's words at the church in Knoxville. _But no angel chose you to go down to hell. God alone chose you, Castiel. And God does not make mistakes._  
  
And Cass, Castiel once, got to his feet and went on, by the grace of God.  
  
* * *  
  
Dean found himself back on the gantry above the Pit just as he had known all this time that it would end here and Lucifer was at his side and he remembered Cass and the dream that had been no dream at all.  
  
_I tried to hold him off but it's too late. It was always too late. I hope it's quick for you and you can finally go home, Cass. Castiel._  
  
He closed his eyes and Lucifer took hold of him and picked him up and threw him over. Dean's fingers struck the railing and he clutched at it and stared up at what remained of his brother for one hopeless second and then the railing slipped from his grasp and he fell.  
  
* * *  
  
Cass saw him fall. He'd come out through the crack in the wall onto a catwalk and at the other end of it he saw the gantry and Lucifer there and Dean and then Dean was lost to the Pit.  
  
He shouted Dean's name but no one could hear him in that din and then he threw himself off the catwalk and down into the Pit himself and now he was among a crush of souls and demons and they were all surging against him like a tide and they took no notice of him because they were running in a wild panic. Even in this place something had made them run and they were clambering the walls like rats and breaking themselves upon the doors and Cass fought his way through them calling for Dean and then suddenly he had him. In his arms. He was torn and bleeding and he lashed out violently and Cass grabbed his face and made him look.  
  
"Dean, it's me. It's me."  
  
Dean stared at him and shook his head and Cass held onto him and nodded fiercely and said, "Yes," and then took Dean's hands and put them on his chest so that he would feel the chain and Dean looked at him and Cass nodded again and he knew Dean understood. And then Cass looked over Dean's shoulder and saw Lucifer standing there in an empty space because all that horde had fled at his coming.  
  
"Storming the gates after all," Lucifer said to Cass and then he raised his hand to him and Dean said, "No," and Lucifer paused.  
  
"Don't touch him," Dean said. "Michael's vessel is yours. Everything you want."  
  
Lucifer lowered his hand. Then he smiled.  
  
"Say what I told you to say."  
  
"One thing first."  
  
"What?"  
  
"I need to see you the way Michael knew you. Face to face, like you said." Lucifer cocked his head at him and Dean said, "I am your real vessel. Let me know you." He paused then said, "Let me see you, brother."  
  
Cass was behind Dean and Dean pushed him back and Cass stepped away. The silence in the Pit was immense. Lucifer stared at Dean and then slowly he turned his face up and closed his eyes.  
  
He said, "Michael," and smiled. "Here I am."  
  
Sam's body fell away from him like a husk and crumpled to the ground and Satan stood there. Corrupted with his sins and flayed from his years of imprisonment and his wings spread out all black and infested and rotting. Yellowed sinews showed through the charred pinions and tarry blood dripped from them and his right side was sheared open to the bone and he hardly knew it, so great was his pleasure in what he was about to have.  
  
Cass seized the chain beneath his clothes and it came away from him simply as if he'd only been wearing it around his neck and it was light and cool as water, and then Dean was gone for Satan had him.  
  
"Say it!" Satan bellowed. Dean was pinned beneath him with his head wrenched back as if Satan would tear open his throat and he said "Say the words!" and Dean rolled his eyes to Cass but Cass stood frozen because he couldn't chain one without the other and it was all as Asmodeus had said so long ago. He saw nothing but Dean. Satan looked up at him and saw the chain and Cass knew that all was lost in that one moment.  
  
"What is that?" Satan hissed and Dean shouted, "Do it!" and then there was another voice.  
  
"Satan!" she called out and her voice rang in that awful silence. Satan turned his head away from Cass and his daughter Sin stood there naked and grotesquely swollen for her time had come round at last. "See what you've made!" She ran a hand over her belly. "This is your last son! This is the beast!"  
  
"The beast," Satan said and he was grinning.  
  
"Who will devour the world." She was at Satan's side and he let go of Dean and put his hands on his daughter. "And I've brought you this enemy who thought he would imprison you."  
  
She looked at Cass and Satan looked with her and Cass thought, _Oh, God no..._ And then while Satan's head was turned in one sudden motion she slit herself open with Cass's knife from groin to breast and something hideous tumbled out of her in a great gush of black pollution. In size it already matched its father and for one moment Satan stared at it before it lunged at him and rode him to the ground and so Dean was free and at once Cass was on Satan with the chain. On both of them, father and son, and Satan threw back his head and roared.  
  
The very foundations of hell quaked at the sound of it and in the Pit and the mines and factories and waystations and all the squalid slums of that underworld demons and souls alike fell to their knees and cowered. On earth the demons who had been at Satan's work in these late years turned and ran howling like wolves or disappeared leaving nothing behind but their sulfurous stink and the men and women who had sided with them knew what they'd done and were terrified as they should have been. In the dark hills of Kentucky a man who as a boy had sweated his way through many sweltering summer sermons suddenly thought of his grandmother and her great serene faith on those hot southern Sundays, and he remembered the prophet that he'd met in Detroit, while a girl named Tanya recalled him also and said a prayer that her friend Amy had taught her, one of many she had learned from that righteous woman. Amidst the ruins of Detroit an old devil who went by many names smiled and lit a cigar and sat back to smoke it with relish, for he had all the time in the world, as did a little spirit from a forgotten race who hated to be called trickster and yet had many tricks up her sleeve and now the whole earth on which to play them again. Finally even Sin's vast legion of offspring paused in their endeavors, and Death himself stood still to listen. Then there was silence over all this world which yet shone like a jewel, pendent from the hand of God.  
  
The ground shuddered and split open and Cass was at one end of the chain and Dean at the other and together they bound Satan and the spawn who was already tearing at him in rage. The chasm gaped until it was at last wide enough for them both to be cast into it and Cass released the chain and Dean did also but at the last moment Satan stretched out his arm and seized Dean.  
  
"This time," he said. "This time you come with me, brother."  
  
Cass shouted _"No!"_ and Dean stared at him in terror but he was on the other side of that gulf and Cass couldn't reach him and Dean fell headfirst into the abyss with nothing to stop him and Cass made to throw himself in after them. He would not lose Dean now. He could not.  
  
Then suddenly Sam had Dean around the waist and he pulled his brother back to safety and the crater closed forever on the howling fury of Satan and Vengeance, his last son.  
  
* * *  
  
In the great quiet that followed Cass crouched stunned on his hands and knees. Then Satan's daughter who had called herself Mary after that other mother of a long-awaited son broke the silence.  
  
She said, "See to your friends," and Cass looked at her and she was standing there belting her coat around her narrow waist. "Go on."  
  
He half-ran and half-stumbled to where they lay. Sam's arms were still wrapped around Dean's waist and both were so still that Cass thought they had died. He knelt beside them and felt their throats and found a pulse, even and strong on Dean but Sam's was high and reedy. He heard footsteps approaching and thought it must be Mary but when he looked up he saw Asher as he'd last seen him in Detroit, still barefoot in his fusty suit with a stink of sulfur and sweat and cigars about him and he was clapping his hands.  
  
"Good job," he said. "I was getting worried you didn't have it in you, but good job." He looked around at the emptiness of that chamber. "Cleaned out this joint too. Ah well, we'll fill it up again soon enough." He saw Mary and winked at her and said, "Won't we, princess?" and she smiled and said nothing.  
  
"Get us out of here," Cass said to him.  
  
"Don't want to hang around for the party?"  
  
"Get us out of here _now._ "  
  
Asher shrugged and they were back in Detroit. In The Cairo's forecourt beside the dead garden with its twisted tree, all of them. The air was still, the sun hot and hazed. It was Mary who turned to go first and Cass called after her.  
  
"Thank you," he said and she answered, "Don't thank me. You served your purpose."  
  
He shook his head. "You protected me. At the waystation, from Clay, from the train engineer...I never even asked you to."  
  
She smiled. "You don't have to ask for what should be offered." She looked at Dean and then back at Cass. "You do love him. I'd never have believed it if I hadn't seen it."  
  
"What will you do now?"  
  
"I'll be very busy. I hear my boys have been running wild. I think they need a mother's hand."  
  
"I'll bet they do," Asher leered and she glanced at him and again said nothing.  
  
"I'll keep this, if you don't mind," she said, holding up the knife.  
  
"Yes, please. Keep it."  
  
She turned away without another word and she walked off and turned the corner and was gone.  
  
Asher said, "Moody, these bitches, right? Sneaky too...who knew she had a bun in the oven?"  
  
Cass ignored him. Dean was stirring under his hand and when he looked down Dean's eyes were open and he was gazing up at the sky and then Cass put his hand on Dean's face.  
  
"Dean?"  
  
"Is it over?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"He's gone?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Sam..." he said and sat up suddenly and turned and Sam was coming around as well. "Sam...Sammy, hey..."  
  
Sam stared at him in a daze and Dean and Cass helped raise him up to sitting and then Dean said, "Oh God," and looked at his hand and it was all bloody. He pushed up Sam's shirt and his right side was sheared open to the bone as Satan's had been.  
  
Dean looked at Cass and then wildly at Asher and he stood up and grabbed Asher by the arm.  
  
"Heal him. Now."  
  
"He's way beyond my help."  
  
"You fucking heal him now!"  
  
Asher shook himself out of Dean's grip. "Even if I could fix that hole he wouldn't stand a chance. You know what he had in him all those years. It's fucking amazing there's anything left of him at all. Azazel must've juiced him up good."  
  
"No..." Dean said. He turned back and knelt down beside Sam.  
  
Sam said, "It's okay, Dean."  
  
"No it's not." To Cass he said, "Help me get him in the shade."  
  
"Dean..."  
  
"Help me. Just help me, Cass."  
  
Together they lifted Sam and Sam gasped in pain and they got him over to The Cairo and set him down in the shade with his back against the wall. Sam sat with his eyes closed taking quick, shallow breaths.  
  
"Hey," Asher said and Cass and Dean both turned to look at him. He held up a shovel and then planted it spade-down in the dirt of the garden. "Don't say I didn't do anything for you."  
  
"Go fuck yourself," Dean said and Asher only smiled and touched his fingers to his temple and then he turned away and went off whistling down the street. Well after he was gone they could hear his whistle echoing in the streets but neither of them cared.  
  
Dean said, "Sammy, you just gotta hold on a little longer, okay? We'll get this fixed up."  
  
"Sure, Dean," Sam said. "Sure. Hey could you...could you maybe get me some water?"  
  
Dean looked at Cass. "Cass, would you..."  
  
"No, you go ahead Dean. I want to talk to Castiel for a minute."  
  
Dean stared at Sam as if he didn't know what he was saying and then he nodded and said, "All right. Okay, Sam." He spun around on his heels and stood up and went to find something for Sam to drink, though Cass was sure there was nothing to be found.  
  
"I told him you were dead," Cass said. "I swear I thought you were."  
  
"Of course you did. I should have been."  
  
"How did you hold on all this time?"  
  
"I wanted to see Dean again. I knew he'd show up eventually. And when he did, I'd be there to help him."  
  
Cass nodded.  
  
"I've made so many mistakes, Castiel. Am I going to hell?"  
  
"No. I think this was your fate. This was the role you had to play."  
  
"Well...that's good, I guess." He closed his eyes for a moment and then looked at Cass. "You'll have to look after him. Lucifer...we did terrible things to him. I thought if he wanted Dean for a vessel he'd treat him like he treated me...before I said yes. But he didn't. And I don't even know all of it. What I know is..." He shook his head. "It's unbearable."  
  
"Don't worry. I'll take care of him."  
  
"You love him, don't you?"  
  
"Yes. I always have."  
  
"Yeah," Sam said and smiled. "I knew that. I think everyone knew it but him. I hope he's figured it out."  
  
"I think so."  
  
"Good," Sam said and then Dean was back.  
  
"I couldn't find a fuckin drop of anything but don't worry about it. We'll figure something out."  
  
"That's okay."  
  
"You did it, man," Dean said. "You fucked him up good." He glanced down at Sam's blood-drenched shirt. "Wish you hadn't fucked yourself up while you were at it."  
  
"Hey, you can't make an omelet without breaking..." His eyes slipped shut and his head tipped to the side.  
  
"Sam..." Dean took his face in his hands. "Hey, Sam, come on."  
  
Sam opened his eyes.  
  
"I'm so sorry for everything, Dean."  
  
"No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't stop you..."  
  
"You couldn't have. I wouldn't have listened. But it's okay. It's okay now." He closed his eyes again and Dean held onto him. His hands were shaking.  
  
"Sammy?"  
  
Sam opened his eyes.  
  
"You know, Lucifer was right about one thing."  
  
"Yeah? What was that?"  
  
"You, Dean." He smiled. "You were the best big brother."  
  
After a time, Cass touched Dean's arm.  
  
"Dean."  
  
Dean looked at him and shook his head and then he looked back at Sam.  
  
"Dean, he's gone."  
  
Dean put his hands down. He sat back on his heels.  
  
"Can you do anything?"  
  
"No, I can't."  
  
"Could anyone? Someone...is there anyone you could call? Who might listen?"  
  
"I don't think so."  
  
Dean nodded. He looked at Sam.  
  
"Do you think he'd want to be brought back, Dean?"  
  
Dean didn't answer. Then he leaned forward and closed Sam's eyes.  
  
"We have to bury him."  
  
Cass looked up at the sky. It was very hot and the sun was blazing at high noon.  
  
"A little later. When it's cooler."  
  
"All right," Dean said and then he just sat there. The two of them sat helpless under the white summer sky.  
  
* * *

When the sun had lowered Cass rose and went to the garden and picked up the shovel and began to dig. The blisters on his hands broke open at once and began to bleed and he kept digging. In a little while Dean came over and stopped him.  
  
"I'll do that."  
  
"No, it's okay. You stay with Sam."  
  
"Sam's gone. I'll do that."  
  
Cass looked at Dean for a moment and then handed him the shovel.  
  
"Let me know when you need to rest."  
  
"Yeah," Dean said and started shoveling. Cass stood back and watched him. His clothes were torn and bloody and he was so thin. In no time he was soaked with sweat.  
  
"Dean, please, let me..."  
  
"No." Dean pushed him away. "I'll do it."  
  
Cass left him and went to see if he could find water. He went up into the lobby of The Cairo. It was cool and dark inside with a lingering smell of decay. He looked at the stairs and didn't want to go up but he did. The place was completely silent and he heard only his own footfalls on the gritty tiles. From outside, faintly, the sound of digging. He tried every sink he found but none was working. In one room he found a white sheet crumpled in the corner and he shook it out and carried it downstairs over his arm and then back outside. Dean was standing over the open grave beneath the tree. He looked near fainting.  
  
"I think it's deep enough."  
  
"It's deep enough," Cass said. He held out the sheet. "I found this."  
  
Dean looked at it. "Good. Thanks."  
  
They spread the sheet out on the ground and then picked Sam up and laid him on it and folded it over him. Then Dean stood up and stared at the sheet with his hand on his forehead.  
  
"Dean, this can wait till morning. You should rest."  
  
"No. No. It's gonna be dark and there's dogs here and...I can't...I can't let him..."  
  
"We could take him inside with us."  
  
Dean looked up at the gaping doors of The Cairo.  
  
"In there? No. No. Not in there."  
  
"All right," Cass said. "Then let's finish it."  
  
They lifted Sam and carried him to the grave and laid him inside. When that was done Dean took up the shovel again.  
  
"Let me help you."  
  
"No, Cass. I have to do this."  
  
Cass nodded and stood back. He stayed close in case Dean collapsed but he didn't. When Dean was finished he tamped the dirt down over the grave and stood there and then suddenly he reached around to his back pocket and pulled out a small book and Cass saw it was a Gideon's Bible of the sort one finds in motel rooms.  
  
"Where did you get that?"  
  
"Lucifer. Lucifer gave it to me. I think he thought it was a joke. I don't know." He flipped through it shakily and then gave up and put it back in his pocket. "I thought I'd find something to say but I don't..." He shook his head. He got down on his knees and put his hands flat on the fresh-turned earth and knelt there, trembling. He didn't say anything.  
  
It was dusk now and night would be coming on soon. Cass crouched and put an arm around Dean.  
  
"Dean. We have to get inside before it's dark."  
  
"In there?"  
  
"No, we can find someplace else but we should go..."  
  
"In there's fine," Dean said. "It's fine."  
  
They stood up and stepped over the low railing around the garden. Halfway up The Cairo's steps Dean's legs gave way and Cass held him up and got him inside and set him down on the floor. He sat down behind him and took him in his arms as he had done at the freight office in Knoxville when he had saved Dean with the gift of Anna's grace. Dean put his head back on Cass's shoulder and lay there with his eyes open.  
  
Cass kissed him and whispered, "Dean." And then again, "Dean."  
  
* * *  
  
He woke in the middle of the night and Dean was not with him. The air in The Cairo's lobby had turned stifling and Cass stood up in the dark and called out for Dean. No one answered. He had closed the doors with the coming of night to keep them safe and now one of them stood open and he went out and there was enough light in the sky to see Dean sitting in the garden with his forehead on his knees. He went down the steps and to the garden.  
  
"Dean, please, it's not safe out here."  
  
Dean looked up. His eyes were dry.  
  
"There's nothing out here, Cass. There's nothing left."  
  
Cass listened and indeed the city was silent around them and seemed utterly lifeless. He could believe they were the only living things in it.  
  
"Did you sleep at all?" he asked and Dean shook his head and bent it back down to his knees and Cass sat down on the ground beside Dean and kept vigil with him for the rest of the night.  
  
The morning came, still and sultry. Cass thought it must be midsummer or later. August maybe. He didn't know what year it might be. He had no idea how much time had passed.  
  
"We need to find water," he told Dean and Dean blinked at him and nodded and stood up. He was in a wretched state. Cass wanted to find someplace where Dean could at least wash out his wounds but he doubted there was any running water in the city.  
  
"I think we should go to the river. It's not that far from here."  
  
"All right."  
  
Together they left The Cairo. Cass looked back once but Dean didn't. The city around them seemed much reduced even from its previous state of dereliction. There were entire blocks on which not a single structure was left standing and all of the sidewalks were cracked with sunscorched weeds high as corn stalks growing up from them and in places the asphalt was so cratered it had begun to sink into the ground beneath it. They turned down a street that had a few houses left on it and Cass told Dean they had to find him at least a new shirt and something to wear on his feet and only then did Dean notice that he was barefoot and half-dressed in bloody rags and even so he hardly seemed to care. In every house they entered the few remaining pieces of clothing were decayed beyond use. At last Cass was able to collect a t-shirt and socks and a pair of sneakers and a sheet he could use for bandaging. He found a plastic soda bottle and took that too for water.  
  
At the river they climbed under a fence and then down the bank and Dean stood there and undressed. Cass could count his backbones and every one of his ribs. His hipblades stuck out like handlebars. He was bruised and bloodied from the Pit and there was a gruesome wound on his shoulder half-covered by a sodden bandage. He turned and walked into the river and then bent down and collected water in his hands and drank.  
  
Still dressed, Cass also went into the water. He drank and hoped the water wouldn't make them sick but it tasted clean and there had been no industry here to pollute it for a long time. He soaked his bleeding hands and closed his eyes in relief and stayed there for a while. The sun was risen and it was very warm on his back, his face. This would be a hot day.  
  
When he opened his eyes he saw Dean sitting in the shallow water with his arms around his knees. Cass waded up onto the shore and took Dean's castoff shirt and went back into the water and knelt down and soaked the shirt and wrung it out and began to wash the blood from Dean's back.  
  
"You don't have to do that," Dean said but he sounded half stunned so Cass went on. He carefully slid the wet bandage from Dean's shoulder and laved water up onto the wound and Dean shuddered.  
  
"I'm sorry. I have to clean it, though."  
  
"It's all right."  
  
When the blood was washed away Cass could make out the teethmarks in the wound even through the swelling and he knew who had done this. He wanted to put his arms around Dean and hold him but he thought if he did he wouldn't be able to finish what he was doing. All the while Dean said nothing and after a while Cass stopped and looked at him and followed his gaze over the glassy river and the mangled bridge and the empty shore on the other side. It seemed an eternity since they had first seen this place. Maybe it was.  
  
"Are we saints now?" Dean asked suddenly.  
  
Cass shook himself out of his thoughts and made a compress of the shirt and laid it over the bite.  
  
"I don't know."  
  
"This would look like shit in stained glass," Dean said and he turned to look at Cass and almost smiled.  
  
Cass thought of the saints he had known in his long, long life.  
  
"This is how saints look. The stained glass comes later."  
  
Dean nodded and then he took the shirt from Cass and said that he would finish. When he came back on the shore Cass helped him bandage his shoulder and he got dressed and the two of them climbed up from the river and made for the city limits.  
  
* * *  
  
It was already so hot that Cass's clothes were dry by the time they reached Route 85. The roadbed had crumbed and their way was blocked by a mountain of broken concrete and bricks as if an entire building had been demolished on the spot.  
  
"Someone put this here on purpose," Cass said.  
  
They tried to leave the city by the other southward roads only to encounter similar obstructions. Cass remembered the pileups and concrete barriers that had been in place when they had first come to Detroit but these were much bigger. Crushed autos stacked into towers. Heaps of rubble. A wall of shipping containers spanned Interstate 75 in both directions. By now it was afternoon and they had nothing to eat and only the one bottle of water and the sun was scorching and there was not a breath of wind.  
  
"We have to go back through the city," Dean said. "Find a way out west or north."  
  
Their route took them past the train station and as they approached it they saw that not even half of the tower was still standing and the roof of the station itself had caved in so that the front facade with its three arched and ironbound windows was almost all that was left of the place. There was a corpse hanging from the front of the building and Cass stopped and stared at it and Dean was already several paces ahead of him when he turned around and asked Cass what he was doing.  
  
"It's Asher," Cass said.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Asmodeus," he said and then climbed through a hole in the chainlink fence and crossed the broken concrete to the train station and looked up and it was indeed the remains of Asher swinging from a rope over the grand entrance of Michigan Central. He was naked and he'd been both gutted and mutilated between his legs and his white shirt was tied around his neck like a bib. The word RAPIST was written on it in his blood and his face still held a look nasty surprise. The city was so empty of life that there weren't even any flies to trouble the corpse but it stank in the heat. On the marble stones beneath Asher's body the rest of his clothes sat in a heap along with the bone-handled knife which first Dean and then Cass had carried for so many years and it was clean and shining and beside it Mary had written _Thank you._  
  
Cass picked up the knife and looked at it and then looked back up at Asher's body.  
  
"That woman did it, didn't she?" Dean asked and Cass nodded.  
  
"Who was she?"  
  
"Lucifer's daughter."  
  
"Jesus Christ," Dean said. "She helped you?"  
  
"Yes," Cass said. "But so did he."  
  
They stood there for a moment and then Dean said, "Well. The sign is right anyway," and he turned and walked away and after another moment Cass put the knife in his boot and followed him.  
  
By afternoon they had given up on the westbound roads and turned north. They had no map and only Dean's memory to follow but it had been years since he had been in the old Detroit and so much had happened since then that they seemed to be going in circles and finally they sat down in the shade to rest and drink.  
  
Cass said, "It'll be night soon."  
  
"I want to get out of here."  
  
"We could find someplace to sleep."  
  
"No. We're getting out of here. I don't care if we have to dig our way out. We're getting out."  
  
Cass nodded. "All right."  
  
Near sunset they struck the northern portion of Interstate 75 with its green reflector signs still pointing towards Hamtramck and Highland Park and Pontiac and although there was an impasse on the highway they found a local street that was open. At dusk they finally crossed the city limits and put Detroit behind them at last.  
  
* * *  
  
They walked all the next day in some northward direction. They tried to follow the interstate but it was too hot and they took to the local roads where they could at least find shade. They walked through deserted neighborhoods and tried to find a car that would run but they couldn't. They began to hear birds again, and insects in the high summer brush but they didn't see another person or any sign that these places were inhabited. That evening they broke into a house and found some canned food in a closet but no can opener and Cass used the knife to puncture the top of a can of peaches until he was able to pry it off and they sat on the floor of the kitchen and ate ancient peach slices and drank the juice and Cass watched Dean in the failing summer light.  
  
"Dean, we need to turn south."  
  
Dean looked up at Cass as if he'd forgotten he was there.  
  
"Why?"  
  
"Shouldn't we try to get to Kentucky? To Amy?"  
  
"You think she's still there."  
  
"I don't know, but..."  
  
"I don't think she's there. I don't think anyone's there. We'll walk all the way to Kentucky and find nothing but a cellar hole where that house was."  
  
"She had a better chance of surviving than most."  
  
Dean shook his head.  
  
"I want to go north. Get out of this heat. Up by the lake."  
  
"The lake."  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"That's too far."  
  
"No it isn't."  
  
Cass said, "Dean..." and leaned forward to touch him and Dean flinched back and Cass sat there with his hand in midair and suddenly he was afraid. "Dean, are you sick?"  
  
"No."  
  
"Let me see your shoulder."  
  
"It's fine."  
  
"Let me see it."  
  
"It's fine. I'm not sick. I'm just tired. And hot. It's too fucking hot."  
  
"Try to get some sleep tonight."  
  
"I will."  
  
The mattresses on the beds upstairs were sagging and rotted so they lay down in the living room. There seemed no need for either of them to be on watch. Cass put his arm around Dean and Dean stayed there for a moment and then got up and lay down a few feet away.  
  
"Dean?"  
  
"It's so goddamn hot," Dean said and then he didn't say anything else. In a while Cass heard his breathing even out into sleep and then fatigue overcame Cass and he also fell asleep. In the middle of the night he heard Dean get up and walk through the house but he was too exhausted to rouse himself. He thought he might be dreaming and that it wasn't Dean he heard but some ghost haunting this house. He fell back into a heavy black sleep and when he woke Dean was up and waiting for him on the porch and the rising sun was already hot and yellow and baleful.  
  
* * *  
  
They walked for three more days and left the cities and suburbs behind them. The land thinned out into small towns and then rolling fields and woods and the sky grew large above them, colorless with heat. Dean barely said a word unless Cass spoke to him and he'd begun to limp but he wouldn't rest for more than a few minutes until it was too dark to keep going. Then Dean would fall asleep at once but in the middle of the night he would get up and Cass would awaken and watch him and when he left the room Cass would rise also and follow him.  
  
By the middle of the fourth day heavy thunderheads were rolling in and a hot wind had begun to blow. They were in open country and to the north Cass could see long curtains of rain and a black sky stitched with lightning.  
  
"We need to get inside," he said, but Dean kept walking.  
  
"Dean," he said. He put his hand on Dean's shoulder and Dean stopped and turned around and looked at him as if he were in a trance. His shirt rippled in the wind over his bony ribs. His damp hair blew back from his forehead. "There's a storm coming. We have to get inside."  
  
Dean nodded and didn't say anything. They came to a sagging farmhouse with a heat-shriveled willow tree in the front yard and fields of dry corn behind it. The door was not locked. It was stifling inside.  
  
"We should go down to the cellar."  
  
"No. No cellar."  
  
"They have tornadoes up here, don't they?"  
  
"I don't care."  
  
"Dean..."  
  
"I'm not going to the goddamn cellar," he said. "I'm staying up here."  
  
"All right," Cass said. "We'll stay up here."  
  
Dean sat down in a corner of the living room and Cass sat in the opposite corner. The light turned thick and green and the walls moaned in the wind but there seemed to be no air in the house at all. After a while Dean lay down on the floor. In the growing dark Cass went over to him and started to take off his sneakers.  
  
"What're you doing?" Dean muttered.  
  
"It's so hot in here."  
  
Dean said, "Just leave it," but Cass already had one sneaker off and when he saw that Dean was too tired to sit up he got the other one off and his socks too. His feet were bleeding.  
  
"We need to find you something else to wear," Cass said. Dean didn't answer.  
  
The first drops of rain began to hit the house. In a few minutes it became a torrent. The wind howled and thunder shook the house hard enough to rattle the windows and now Cass heard hailstones striking the roof and the cornstalks. It was dark as night except for the blue stutter of lightning. Cass closed his eyes and thought that if a cyclone hit this house they stood little chance of surviving and was surprised to realize that he hardly cared.  
  
The storm tapered off in slow stages until there was nothing left but the sound of water dripping from the eaves. The light returned. Cass could see Dean lying asleep and he approached him quietly and felt his forehead and his cheek with the back of his hand. He was hot but not feverish. He didn't stir.  
  
Cass stood up and looked around the room. He opened the front door and then a window to let in a breeze but the storm had left no coolness in its wake, only more heat, heavy and wet.  
  
He walked through the kitchen and let himself out onto the back porch. He sat down on the steps and looked out over the fields. The setting sun had broken through the clouds and was lying slanted and sulfurous across the hazy earth. He looked up and saw patches of blue sky through the gray clouds. Two birds circled each other high above, black as silhouettes. Hawks, maybe.  
  
"Were you able to do that?"  
  
Cass turned and saw Dean standing behind him also looking up at the birds.  
  
"Do what?"  
  
"Fly. Like that. Before."  
  
He looked at the birds again and as he watched them a memory came to him suddenly of a night when they had still been at Amy's place in Kentucky. In their curtained alcove at the top of the house. He was lying facedown in bed and Dean had caressed him between the shoulder blades and asked him if this was where his wings had been. When Cass had said yes Dean had kissed him there. The memory was so vivid that a shiver ran up Cass's spine.  
  
"Not exactly like that. But close."  
  
"Mm-hm," Dean said. He came and sat down on the steps, not touching Cass. He put his elbows on his knees and stared at the steaming landscape.  
  
Finally Cass said, "Dean, please...tell me what to do. Tell me how to help you."  
  
Dean looked at him.  
  
"Where is everyone? Where are they?"  
  
"We'll come across someone. We always did."  
  
Dean shook his head.  
  
"Maybe they're all gone. Maybe no one was saved after all."  
  
"I don't believe that."  
  
Dean smiled thinly.  
  
"Well I've got another theory. Wanna hear it?" Cass nodded and Dean looked down at the ground and said, "Lucifer told me that if I didn't say yes to him he'd kill me. Or let me die, same thing. And then I'd stay down there for good. No get out of hell free this time." He looked at Cass. "So maybe that happened. Hm?"  
  
"No it didn't. Lucifer's gone, you saw it yourself."  
  
"I don't know what I saw. All I know is this sure feels like hell to me. I watched my brother die. I had to bury him in that....place. Everything's falling apart and we've been walking for days and haven't seen one person, not one."  
  
Cass said, "Dean..." and reached out and took him by the shoulders and Dean shrank back against the stair rails and Cass held onto him. "Dean, this isn't hell. Do you think we'd be together in hell?"  
  
"Yeah. We _are_ together. We're so together that you're the only person I've seen. Isn't that funny?" Cass stared at him and Dean said, "Are you him? Or another one of them? Or maybe something he cooked up just for me?"  
  
"Dean, stop it." He was shaking and he touched Dean's face and then dropped his hands to Dean's shoulders again and came in close and put his arms around Dean and Dean let him and then they were kissing. Cass said, "We're not in hell. We're not in hell and Lucifer's gone and we're not in hell..." He held Dean tightly and kissed his face and his neck and his shoulder and held onto him and then Dean was climbing on top of him. He unfastened Cass's jeans and then his own and shoved them down and took Cass between the legs and stroked him roughly until he was hard. Then he rose up and pushed himself down on his cock and started to ride him. Cass gazed up at Dean breathless.  
  
"Dean," he gasped. "Dean..." He tried to pull Dean down to kiss him and Dean lurched up and seized Cass by the arms and threw him over and thrust up into him and fucked him. Cass lay sprawled across the stairs with his eyes clenched shut and let him go on. It was harsh and painful but quick and when Dean came he pulled out right away and climbed off him. After a few seconds Cass turned over. Dean had already fastened himself up and he glanced down at Cass and then looked away and almost fell down the three steps and staggered out over the dirt lane that led into the corn. At the edge of the fields there was a shallow barrel planter full of rainwater and Dean got down on his knees and bent over and scooped water over his head and face and neck and then knelt there. Cass caught his breath and pulled up his jeans and closed them with unsteady hands.  
  
The sky had turned purple and the crickets and night creatures were whirring in the grass when Dean stood up and came back to the house. He climbed the stairs without looking at Cass and was heading back inside when Cass said, "You should sleep out here. It's too hot in there."  
  
He heard Dean go into the house and then come back outside and the creak of the porchboards as he lay down. Cass waited until he thought Dean was asleep and then he stood up and walked out into the fields. A late summer moon was rising huge and crimson on the horizon and the clouds in the sky were scalloped and gleaming like waves upon the sea.  
  
"Why aren't you helping us?" he said. He clenched his fists and unclenched them and shook with anger. "We did everything we were supposed to do. Why aren't you helping us?"  
  
He received no answer. By and by he returned to the house. He climbed up on the porch and lay down behind Dean. After a while he placed one hand on Dean's shoulder, softly. In the moonlight he saw Dean's eyes open and the shadow of his lashes on his cheek and Dean blinked once, twice, and then closed his eyes.  
  
* * *  
  
The sky was just turning gray when Cass woke. The air was hot and still. He heard a sound in the house and he got up and went inside. Dean was sitting on the couch bandaging his feet with strips of torn curtain.  
  
"I think we should spend the day here. Maybe the heat will break."  
  
Dean shook his head without looking at him.  
  
"We have to keep going till we find someone. We're too close to Detroit. There'll people near the lake."  
  
"They'll still be there tomorrow."  
  
"I'm going. You can stay here if you want."  
  
"No. I'm going with you."  
  
"Suit yourself," Dean said. He put on his socks and sneakers and stood up and walked out.  
  
It was the hottest day they'd yet encountered and they were in farm country that was broad and treeless. The road shimmered in the heat and the fields on both sides of it were brown and dusty in spite of yesterday's rain and Cass walked behind Dean to keep an eye on him and Dean didn't once turn around to see if he was still there. At maybe half past noon Cass saw a small stand of trees to the east and he came up beside Dean and told him they had to rest until it was cooler.  
  
_I'll knock him out if I have to,_ Cass thought, but after a moment Dean nodded and followed Cass to the trees. They were at the top of a small rise in the country and now Cass could see more trees in the distance and water glinting between their trunks but an expanse of parched earth lay baking in the sun between them and the river and he decided they should wait until early evening to head down to the water. Dean was already sitting against one of the trees nearly panting. Cass sat down beside him and gave him some water and Dean drank and handed the bottle back to him and put his head back and closed his eyes. Cass took out the last roll of makeshift bandages from Detroit and soaked it in water and wiped Dean's dry face and Dean opened his eyes and looked at him.  
  
"I've been here before," he said.  
  
Cass paused with the compress against Dean's cheek.  
  
"No, you haven't."  
  
Dean smiled and closed his eyes.  
  
"I know what happens here," he said and then he fell silent.  
  
Cass sat there and watched Dean. Insects droned in the dry grass and a haze of dust lay over the land and the air was heavy and soporific. By and by Cass fell asleep. He dreamed of rain, night rain and the sound of windshield wipers and the shimmer of headlights on wet highway and the radio turned down low. He asked Dean what the song was and Dean laughed and said Cass should know this stuff by now and then Cass said it was the crossroads song. _Melissa,_ Dean said. _That's the name_ and Cass said, _I think it's about you,_ and Dean just shrugged and said he'd never known anyone named Melissa. The night was dark and soft and so cool and the rain coming down and the road wide open and no one on it but them.  
  
He woke up to the heat and the whirring grass and reached out for Dean but he wasn't there. Cass opened his eyes and sat up sharply and saw Dean standing out under the sun a ways off. He seemed nailed to the spot. Cass called his name but Dean didn't turn around and then Cass looked in the distance and saw someone standing there watching Dean. From here it looked like a child, a little girl in a white dress and Cass got to his knees and even as he rose the little girl turned and ran away into the trees.  
  
"Hey!" Dean shouted. "Wait!" He broke into a run and Cass clambered to his feet and went after him.  
  
"Dean, stop! _Dean!_ "  
  
Cass thought he'd faint and still Dean was running and far ahead of him. He couldn't see the girl anymore at all. A cloud of dust kicked up waist high around them.  
  
_"Dean!"_  
  
Dean had made it nearly to the trees when Cass saw him fall to his knees. He reached him and caught him in his arms and turned him over and Dean stared up at the sky and he was flushed and breathless and the heat of his body was baking through his clothes.  
  
"Dean...Dean?"  
  
Dean said, "She was...there was..." and then his eyes closed and he started to shudder.  
  
Cass tried to pick him up and couldn't and he looked up in wild desperation and the girl was there again at the edge of the trees.  
  
"Help!" he shouted.  
  
There were other people coming up behind her from the riverbank. He cradled Dean in his arms and tried to hold him still.  
  
"Help us! Please!"  
  
They were in white like the girl, men and women and children. They were carrying branches in their hands and now they began to run and some of them cast the branches away but others held onto to them and they were running with these boughs held aloft like heralds and all in white. As if greeting angels. As if welcoming saints.  
  
* * *  
  
They put him in the shade and soaked his clothes with river water and sat him up and made him drink. He couldn't talk. His eyes were wandering. They picked him up and laid him in the river at a place where a canopy of branches hung down cool and green to the water and Cass sat in the water and held him up and said his name and Dean opened his eyes and looked all around and then he just stared at Cass.  
  
"It's all right," he said to Dean. "Everything's all right." If Dean understood he gave no sign.  
  
They put Dean in the flatbed of a dusty brown pickup and Cass rode with him. Dean opened his eyes once more and then closed them. The little girl they'd first seen rode up in the cab and watched them through the back window. There were people riding in the truckbed with them and Cass asked where they were going and they said to Pastor Henry's house and Cass just nodded and didn't ask who Henry or any of these people were. When they reached the house Cass got Dean out of his dripping clothes and they put him to bed in a room downstairs. Someone opened the window and the curtains lifted on a rising breeze.  
  
* * *  
  
After dark the little girl brought a candle into the room and said yesterday's storm had knocked out the power but it should be on again in a few days. Cass thought she must be teasing. She looked about seven years old and she stood at the foot of the bed and watched them.  
  
"Is he better?" she asked.  
  
Cass smiled at her.  
  
"I think so. We're lucky you were there."  
  
"Daddy said he's sick because of the heat."  
  
"He's right."  
  
"He shouldn't've been running outside like that."  
  
"No, he shouldn't have."  
  
Her father came into the room. He put his hand on his daughter's head and told her to go to her room and she said goodnight to Cass.  
  
"Goodnight, Grace," he said.  
  
"He'll be okay in the morning."  
  
"I'm sure he will."  
  
After she'd gone, Henry stood there looking at Dean and then he asked how he was doing.  
  
"His temperature's still up, but it's better than it was."  
  
"Were you able to get him to drink again?"  
  
"A little while ago. I want to let him sleep."  
  
"You should wake him up a few more times tonight. Make sure he keeps drinking."  
  
"I will."  
  
"How are your hands?"  
  
Cass looked down at them. When Henry had seen the shape they were in he'd made Cass put on some salve and then helped to wrap them up. Cass smiled and said they felt much better.  
  
Henry was quiet for a while and then he said, "Will you come in the kitchen for a minute? I'd like to talk to you and I don't want to wake him up."  
  
"I don't want to leave him alone."  
  
"Just for a few minutes. We're right in the next room, he'll be fine."  
  
Cass looked at Dean and felt his forehead and then nodded and got up and followed Henry into the kitchen. There was an oil lamp burning on the table and Henry apologized for the lack of electricity in the manner of someone making small talk before getting down to business and then he turned to Cass and said, "I have to ask you something and I need you to tell me the truth."  
  
"All right."  
  
"Is he sick?"  
  
"No...it was just the heat."  
  
"He's not infected?"  
  
"Infected...you mean Croatoan?"  
  
"I saw that thing on his shoulder. Who did that to him?"  
  
"His brother," Cass said. He was too weary to lie.  
  
"How did that happen?"  
  
He was almost too weary to lie.  
  
"He was drunk. Out of his mind drunk. They had an argument and it just got out of hand. He took off and we haven't seen him since."  
  
"And you're sure _he_ wasn't sick? This brother?"  
  
"I'm sure. He just...he wasn't himself."  
  
"Okay. Okay, because if the virus is back, you understand I'd have to take care of it."  
  
"Back?"  
  
"Well, you know it's been about a good five years since we heard of an outbreak."  
  
"I'm sorry," Cass said. "I'm sorry, can you just...can you remind me what year it is?"  
  
Henry stared at him in the lamplight and then said, "It's 2022. August twenty-first." He looked at the clock over the stove. "Almost the twenty-second."  
  
"Oh," Cass said. "Right," and suddenly he didn't think he could stand up. He put his hand on the table and then he pulled out a chair and sat down before he could fall down and he set his elbows on the table and covered his mouth and stared at the flame flickering inside the lamp's glass shade.  
  
"What's wrong?"  
  
"I don't know, I just...I'm just tired I guess." The lampflame blurred and swirled in his vision like headlights on a wet highway.  
  
He felt Henry's hand on his shoulder.  
  
"You should get some rest, too" he said quietly. "Do you want to stay with Dean tonight?" Cass nodded and Henry told him there were pillows and blankets in the closet if needed them.  
  
"Thank you."  
  
"You're welcome. I'll see you in the morning."  
  
"Goodnight."  
  
"'Night," Henry said. In the doorway he turned back to Cass. "I'll want to hear the rest of your story in the morning. You said you came up from Detroit but you know that's not possible."  
  
"But it's true."  
  
Henry shook his head. "It can't be," he said and then turned and left Cass alone in the kitchen. Cass listened to him go up the stairs and then he stood up and went back into the bedroom where Dean lay asleep. He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at Dean and touched his cheek. There was a facecloth in a bowl of water beside the bed and he picked it up and wrung it out and wiped Dean's face, gently so that he wouldn't wake him. Dean stirred and raised his hand and Cass thought he would push him away but he took Cass's arm and opened his eyes.  
  
"Did you see them?"  
  
"The people at the river?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Yes. There's a lot of them here." Cass smiled. "I think you'd have called them holy rollers."  
  
Dean frowned and shook his head.  
  
"No, not them. The other ones. Did you see them?"  
  
"The other ones?"  
  
"They were all over. All across the water." Cass didn't say anything and Dean went on. "There were so many of them. Everyone was saved, Cass. Everyone was saved." He closed his eyes and then opened them and said, "Sam. Sam was there."  
  
Cass took the cloth from his hand and set it back in the bowl and linked his fingers with Dean's and Dean didn't pull away.  
  
"Of course he was."  
  
Dean closed his eyes and sighed.  
  
"I saw you too," he murmured. "Clearest of all."  
  
Cass sat quietly for a little while longer. Then he laid Dean's hand down on his chest and put his own hand over it.  
  
"I've always seen you the clearest, Dean. Clearest of all."  
  
He watched Dean sleep for a few minutes and then his own exhaustion overwhelmed him. He got up and found the pillows and blanket in the closet where Henry had said they would be and he made himself a pallet on the floor beside Dean's bed. Then he blew out the candle and lay down and went to sleep.  
  
He woke in the middle of the night to a sound of rain. Steady but soft as a whisper. In the dark he could see the white curtains drifting at the window. He turned over and stood up and saw Dean curled on his side with just the sheet over him and he pulled the light blanket up from the foot of the bed and covered him. Then he went to the window and for a long time he watched the rain fall in the night. The breeze raised goosebumps on his skin. When he woke in the morning the heat had broken and the sky was blue and the air was crisp and tinged with autumn.  
  
* * *  
  
In the end it was Henry who told them his story, not the other way around. He sent his daughter to a neighbor's house and the three of them sat at the kitchen table in the morning sun, Henry, Cass and Dean, pale but clear-eyed. Henry asked them if it was true that they had come from Detroit and Cass and Dean looked at each other and Dean said yes. Henry got up from the table and poured himself a cup of coffee from the percolator on the stove and came back and sat down with it on the table between his hands.  
  
He said he'd been a professor at the University of Michigan. He'd tried to get out of Ann Arbor with his family but they hadn't gotten far enough and his wife and many others were swept up in a raid and he never saw her again. He was able to escape with Grace, who'd been barely two years old at the time. They had tried to make it to the Upper Peninsula but winter had come and they were lucky to find a small refugee camp near Houghton Lake. This was around Christmas of 2016.  
  
"We thought it was the end of the world," Henry said. "The winter solstice came and went but it kept getting darker. A little more every day. Finally the sun never rose at all. It snowed all the time, dry snow, like ashes." He looked down into his coffee. "I taught world religions and folklore at Ann Arbor. Stupid, right? The sort of thing parents tell their kids not to take because it's never going to get them a job. And they were probably right but that kind of thing didn't matter anymore. The people in Houghton...they had nothing. Most of them thought we were just going to die and some of them were so scared that they started doing crazy shit. Going out in the snow half-naked and praying and beating themselves. Talking about offering up sacrifices. I knew how that would end. You don't study religion for most of your life without knowing what happens when terrified people start believing they know what God wants. So I started telling them stories. Just throwing in everything I knew from mythology and the Bible, Native Americans...I think I had some _Lord of the Rings_ in there, too, I don't even know. If anyone thought it was bullshit, they didn't say so. They listened.  
  
"Then in March some new people turned up. They were in horrible shape just...horrible. They brought the virus with them. We lost seven of our own people. We had to burn the place. When we left we kept going until we came here. The first thing we did was set up a church and we waited for the end...but it didn't come. The sun came. That April, one morning, the sun came up. We all went outside and stared at it. Like cavemen. They asked me to lead them in a prayer of thanks and I did. I still do. We dress up. We go down to the river. We pray, and sing. It makes them happy. Hell, it makes _me_ happy, though sometimes I still wonder how I wound up as Pastor Henry. But that's a pretty insignificant mystery these days."  
  
He stopped and looked at both of them.  
  
"Detroit's been closed off for years. No one knows who started it but it was after the sun came back. By then we could get some news and we heard that people were just walling off the city with whatever they could find. Like it was a place where no one should ever go again. I've heard no one will live anywhere around Detroit for miles. And yet you say you came out of there." Cass nodded and then Henry said, "Did anything come out of there with you?"  
  
After a while Dean said, "No. It's over."  
  
Henry nodded. "I'm going to believe that." He got up and went to the sink and looked out the window, into the bright summer morning. "After some of the things I've seen, and heard, I can believe just about anything. I used to think I just taught legends and that their only merit was what they showed us about ourselves and...our common humanity and history, but now I'm not so sure. I haven't been sure of anything like that for a long time. I don't think I ever will be again."  
  
He put his coffee cup in the sink and ran water into it. He smiled.  
  
"We have running water again, I'm sure of that. We have electricity too, when the county can keep it on. In September I'm supposed to go up to Bad Axe for a county meeting. I think there's going to be an argument about stop signs." He turned to them. "You're welcome to stay here as long as you want, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention Detroit to anyone else. Tell them your car broke down and you started walking. You got lost and caught out in the heat. They'll believe it. It's been a hell of a summer."  
  
* * *  
  
Cass woke that night and sat up on the couch. He got up and went into Dean's room and checked on him. He was deeply asleep and Cass went back to the living room and sat down. He thought about what Henry had told them that day. He thought about running water and electricity. He thought about Dean, and Sam and of everything that had happened and all the time that had gone by. Of ancient Asmodeus, dead at last in the lost city of Detroit yet just one among others like him who lived on, and of Sin and her many sons, save one, still walking the earth. He thought of all the souls in hell packed into boxcars or toiling or whoring or loitering in despair for eternity and he knew that even with so much good there was evil in the world that would go on and on without Satan's help. He thought of these things even though he and Dean had lived and had come or been led to this safe place where decent people in their gratitude and hope and faith put on white clothes and went down to the river to pray and sing and he sat there and wept for all of them. The joyous and the suffering, the good and the evil, the living and the dead.  
  
* * *  
  
The brown pickup broke down and Dean said he'd try to fix it. He said he'd once been good with cars. The truck was parked in the barn behind the house and Cass went in there and found him with his head buried under the hood and tools spread out on the fenders and his hands all black and Cass stood there for a while and just watched him. His wounds had begun to heal and he'd cut his hair and gotten some color back in his face and he looked more like himself than Cass had seen him looking since before Detroit but he was still bony and his shoulderblades stuck up sharply through his white t-shirt. He cleared his throat so that Dean would know he was there and Dean looked over his shoulder and said, "Hey," and went back to work. Cass came into the barn and sat down on a bench against the wall and picked up some indecipherable piece of engine and turned it over in his hands.  
  
Finally he said, "How are you feeling?"  
  
"Pretty good," Dean said from under the hood. "Not bad."  
  
"You're sleeping all right?"  
  
"Yeah, considering. Up to a couple hours."  
  
They didn't say anything else. Cass sat and listened to the birds. He gazed up at the barn's loft and rafters. After a time Dean straightened up and set a socketwrench down on the fender and braced his arms against the truck. He stood looking down and Cass looked at him.  
  
Then Dean said, "Back when we were hunting, we'd always meet these people. These mediums or psychics or whatever. They'd always tell us the same thing about spirits. How _sad_ they were. As if we gave a shit when we were there to do a job. But they'd always say that, that even when spirits were angry or dangerous or just mean sons of bitches, it was because they were really so sad. They had to watch life happening all around them and they could never be part of it. They just had to stand there and watch everyone else live." He looked at Cass. "That's what it's like. Isn't it?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"It's not any different for you, since you were an angel?"  
  
"No," Cass said. "Not really."  
  
"I didn't think so."  
  
Dean picked up the wrench and bent over the engine. After a while Cass stood up and went over to him and put his hand on Dean's shoulder. Dean went still and Cass caressed Dean's back once and then left.  
  
* * *  
  
There was a Sunday picnic at the river and they went because Grace said they had to. She adored both of them but especially Dean and Henry told them everyone eventually wound up doing what Grace wanted so they might as well give in.  
  
There were a lot of people, more than Cass had seen so far, and he lost sight of Dean for a little while. In the middle of the afternoon when the grills were cooling and people were settling down on the grass to relax in the day's warmth he saw Dean out in the river, swimming. In all the years he'd known him he'd never once seen Dean swim, or even known that he could, and he stood there and watched him. It was a sight to see.  
  
As Dean was making his way back to shore Grace ran out to the edge of the small dock wearing an inflated seahorse around her waist and jumped into the water and Dean got her and towed her fast out into the river and Cass could hear her laughing all the way out and then back in. When they got out they sat on the dock and Grace stood behind him like a beautician and toweldried his hair, chattering away about something the way children always do and Cass left them there and went back up to the house.  
  
It was a walk of about half a mile and the day was sunny and very warm. Inside the house it was dim and quiet and cool. He went into the room where Dean slept and looked at the bed neatly made and sat down on it. On the nightstand beside the bed was the small Bible that Dean had brought up out of hell. It had gotten drenched when they'd put Dean in the river and had dried to an appearance of old parchment. He couldn't imagine why Dean had kept it.  
  
He lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. In the kitchen the clock ticked softly. Time was so certain here. Weeks didn't pass in a single afternoon, or years in the blink of a devil's eye. It was measured by simple clocks. By the rising and setting of the sun. How good that was. How good it all was.  
  
He thought of his days as an angel and as a man and he thought of Dean. It seemed to him that his part in Dean's life was coming to its end. The world that Dean had once known was returning and Cass saw no place in it for himself except as a reminder of everything Dean had suffered and lost. He knew that when Dean looked at him he saw those long years of flight and hiding and he saw Detroit and The Cairo and hell. He saw his brother dying.  
  
Once, when he was an angel, he had stood in a waitress's house in Dalhart Texas and told Dean that he would have to end what had begun because he had believed that the will of angels was also the will of God and so was good and holy and would lead Dean to mercy and to grace. Cass, Castiel then, had loved him and had wanted those things for him and more besides. And Cass still loved him and he still wanted this for Dean. Even more than he wanted Dean for himself. With these thoughts in his mind, Cass fell asleep.  
  
He woke up some time later. It was late afternoon and the light was burnished to gold and the house was quiet with everyone still down at the river. He lay there for a moment and then sat up and swung his legs off the bed. He glanced at the nightstand and looked again and saw that the Bible was gone. He heard a sound then like a leaf of parchment being turned over and he looked around and saw Dean sitting in the faded wing chair in the corner of the room.  
  
"He shall give his angels charge over thee," Dean read. "To keep thee in all thy ways." He looked up at Cass with the little book open on his knee. "I kept trying to find it and I couldn't. I knew it had to be in here somewhere. Then I just opened the book and there it was." He looked down and then glanced up again and smiled with one eyebrow raised. "They shall bear thee up in thy hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone. You left out that part. Good thinking." He closed the book and held it between his hands and for a while he just sat with his head down.  
  
"When I was in hell, near the end," he said. "For some reason I started thinking about the way it would rain sometimes at night. Out in places where the road is wide open and there's no one on it. Like in Texas. I used to love to drive at night in places like that, especially when it was raining. You know what I mean?"  
  
"Yes," Cass said. "I do."  
  
"These are really good people here. There must be a lot of good people left. But I don't want to be around them anymore. Maybe someday, but not now. I want to go someplace and just drive. Someplace like Texas. Just head out at night and drive. Maybe it'll rain."  
  
"Maybe."  
  
He looked up at Cass.  
  
"I don't want to leave without saying goodbye, but I think they'll understand. Especially Henry."  
  
For a moment Cass couldn't say anything. Then he said, "I'll tell them something for you."  
  
Dean's forehead creased. He got up and went to the window and looked out. He stood there and then he nodded and ran his hand through his hair and looked back at Cass.  
  
"Okay," he said. "If you want to stay that's okay but I thought...I guess I thought you'd come with me."  
  
"Do you want me to?"  
  
"Only if that's what you want. I don't want you to come because of..." he waved the Bible. "Anything that God charged you with or because you think..." he stopped because Cass was on his feet.  
  
"I hardly ever knew what God charged me with and I don't care. God can deal with me how he chooses. If you want me with you, Dean, I'll go where you go. I'll stay where you stay. For the rest of my life or your life, and whatever comes after."  
  
"I want you with me, Cass," Dean said and smiled. "Please."  
  
Cass didn't know he'd crossed the room and yet there he was and he embraced Dean so fiercely that he heard the Bible drop to the floor and Dean was holding him too and his hands were twisted in Cass's shirt. When they kissed it was salted and wet with tears and they kissed and then clung to each other and outside the shadows grew longer and the summer day slipped to its close.  
  
* * *  
  
They decided they would wait until morning to depart and say goodbye after all. Cass was awakened that night by someone shaking him and when he opened his eyes he saw Dean hunkered down beside the couch.  
  
"What is it? What's wrong?"  
  
"Nothing," Dean said. "I couldn't sleep. Take a walk with me."  
  
"Are we leaving?"  
  
"Not yet. Just take a walk with me." He stood up. "Come on."  
  
Cass threw back the blanket and got up. He followed Dean through the kitchen and out the back door. Dean was waiting for him on the porch and the September night was cool and silvered with moonlight.  
  
"Where are we going?"  
  
"Not far," Dean said and turned and went down the porch steps and out towards the barn. The moon lay on the grass and crickets chirped in the still night air.  
  
They reached the barn and went inside. It was very dark and he could just make out Dean skirting his way around the pickup truck. The only light came from the loft and he saw Dean climbing the ladder.  
  
"Dean?"  
  
"This way," Dean said. By then he was already pulling himself up into the loft.  
  
It was bright up there with the loft door wide open to the moonlit countryside and the land was all spread out before them. Fields and little houses and stands of trees. The silver track of the river winding away in the distance. Cass turned to look at Dean beside him and told him it was beautiful.  
  
Dean smiled.  
  
"I didn't come up here for the view." He slipped his arms around Cass's waist.  
  
"I know," Cass said and Dean kissed him. Cass put his arms around Dean and they kissed and without another word they began to undress each other.  
  
"I didn't want to do this in the house," Dean said. He pulled Cass's t-shirt over his head and kissed him. "Little kid sleeping upstairs." He slid Cass's shorts off his hips. "Messing up the bed."  
  
"Of course not," Cass said and then Dean stepped back with his hands on Cass's chest and looked at him. With his fingers Dean traced the burns that the chain had left all across him. They had healed as soon as Cass had taken off the chain but left behind a twisted map of scars.  
  
"That was one hard fucking miracle, wasn't it?" Dean said softly.  
  
"Yes it was." He took Dean's hand and kissed his fingers. "It was."  
  
When they were naked they lay down on the straw and caressed each other and kissed and then Dean rolled onto his side with his back to Cass and Cass took him in his arms and kissed his neck and whispered, "Like this? You're sure?"  
  
"Yes. Like this."  
  
Cass wet himself with his own saliva and clear slick and slid up inside and Dean caught his breath.  
  
"Dean?"  
  
"Go ahead. It's all right."  
  
He moved inside Dean slow and deep and held him close. He reached down and took Dean in his hand and circled and stroked him. They hardly made a sound. The straw shifted and rustled beneath them.  
  
He came with his cheek pressed against Dean's shoulder and Dean gripped Cass's wrist and came into his hand. He sighed and lay there breathing deeply. When Cass withdrew Dean turned over and lay against him. After a little while Dean stood up and began to get dressed and Cass did the same. At the foot of the ladder they embraced and kissed in the dark and then together they made their way back to the quiet house. The moon was setting and the stars were above them, very bright.  
  
* * *  
  
They were hitchhiking by night along a southern road and the night was warm and drowsy as it only ever is in that part of the country but there was a misty coolness in it and the promise of season's change. Soon a truck pulled up along the shoulder with its running lights all glowing and Cass felt the rumble of its engine in the blacktop under his feet and heard the chuffing wheeze of the brakes and the driver pushed the passenger door open and told them to get on in. Dean swung himself up into the cab as if he belonged there at that moment and nowhere else, with that ease of his that he'd always had. He turned and his face was lit up in the dashboard lights just as it had once been on so many nights in the Impala and he held his hand down to Cass and Cass took his hand and pulled himself up. As he shut the door the driver said that it was starting to rain and Dean looked at Cass and smiled.  
  
"I'm going over the Texas border, that far enough for you?"  
  
"That's fine," Dean said. "That's just where we want to go."  
  
The driver put the truck in gear and it lurched off the shoulder and out into the dark, headed west with the night. For a while the glow of taillights could be seen through the mist and then the truck swung onto the highway and they were gone and the night was quiet, but for the falling rain.  
  
_The End  
  
May 23, 2010 - March 25, 2011  
  
Thank you for reading._


End file.
